6 Advantages of Puzzles for Child Development
When your toddler grabs those little pieces of a puzzle with an effort to put them together, you might cringe at the sight as they jam the fragments. However, with repeated efforts, your child is most likely to be able to solve the same puzzle in a few month’s time.
The reason why this happens is because your child’s brain is developed over time. As seemingly insignificant toy that keeps the children engaged, puzzles are a favourite of both parents and teachers. But do you know that puzzles come with an array of benefits for children?
Here are a few ways that puzzles are proved to be advantageous for your child’s development.
As per researchers of psychology, parents and practitioners can harness a set of promising approaches that promote healthy motivation and facilitate learning during their early years of development.
Improves concentration
If your child’s ability to concentrate lasts no longer than a minute, don’t stress. You’re not alone. In fact, this is a real challenge that most parents face. Experts say that your child should be expected to concentrate only 2-5 times their age. For instance, if your child is 3 years old, their concentration span can range between anything from 6 minutes to 15 minutes.
Puzzles are a great tool to increase concentration as it demands utter focus and exercises the brain. Find a puzzle for your child that is perfect for their age, neither too challenging, nor too easy to solve. This will certainly up their concentration game.
Spatial Awareness
You might have noticed often that while playing, your child innovates the game all by themselves. For instance, if he’s playing with a car and trying to pass the car from under the bridge but soon discovers that the bridge is too small, he’ll automatically understand that when the car bumps.
This is because your child is developing spatial awareness which essentially involves being aware of yourself and the space where objects related to you behave with each other. Solving puzzles fuels spatial awareness big time. Children identify the pieces and try their best to establish a relation between the pieces.
Shape Recognition
Children need to learn to differentiate between the different shapes like triangles, rectangles, circles and squares. Initially, they might face troubles differentiating squares from rectangles. However, slowly, they learn to identify the different shapes.
With the help of puzzles, children can be taught geometry or the basic outlines of shapes of the different objects in the puzzle. This is important because before learning the alphabets, it is important for your child to learn basic geometric terms such as straight lines, circles, triangles, etc. This will make the process easier for them.
Topic-Specific Knowledge
You must have noticed that puzzles often consist of specific objects or places. Perhaps a map or a giraffe can be broken down in a puzzle. This is because they help your child to learn more about the world. It makes it easier for them to familiarise with different environments and enhances their scope of knowledge.
Certain programs are coming up with innovative puzzle courses that help children learn better in the name of games.
Fine Motor Ability
Your toddlers tiny hands trying to grab the small pieces of a puzzle and dropping them time and again might seem clumsy. Most kids can’t tie laces, pour juice without spilling or write initially. This is because they’re very young and their motor skills haven’t developed yet.
When it comes to solving puzzles, the constant trial and error immensely helps children to develop their motor skills which involves the ability to make effective small movements with their fingers, wrists, hands, toes and feets. Thus, avoiding helping them everytime they make a mistake. Let them learn from their natural instincts.
Hand-Eye Coordination
When your little one moves her hand to write, you’d notice that her eyes are watching the pen move across the page. This sends information to the brain regarding the manipulation of the pen. After repeated attempts, they’ll learn to best coordinate their hand-eye coordination.
Puzzles are of much help in this aspect. When children repeatedly try to establish a connection with the pieces of puzzle in their hands and the ones in the maze, they’re essentially sending signals to their brain regarding the coordination. The more they do it, the better they coordinate the two.
At MS Dhoni Global School, we inculcate similar practices for the cognitive development of our students. Trainers effectively assist students with innovative learning tools that fuel holistic development.
