Toddler puzzles are a great educational and entertaining activity, and you can start early. At around 10 months, babies start to do their own version of puzzles: putting stuff – especially their pacifiers – into containers, and taking it all out again. This exercise helps children develop basic motor skills and problem solving. As they get more proficient, they’ll work up to stacking ring toys or shape sorters (put the square block into the square hole).
Between 18 and 24 months, infants will probably be able to do puzzles that require putting pieces into designated spots on a board. And then somewhere between 2 and 3, toddlers can start working on small, traditional puzzles with some number of pieces that interconnect – in addition to continuing to build up fine motor skills and problem solving, these teach focus, persistence, and analytical thinking. Finishing a puzzle also provide a nice emotional boost, as there’s something to show for the effort at the end.
In the Journal of Child Care Quarterly, Nancy Maldonado, a specialist in early childhood education, goes further, noting that puzzles increase grip strength, small-finger coordination, eye-hand coordination, object recognition, problem solving, color matching, ability to see complex relationships, ability to draw from prior knowledge and experience, and level of autonomy.
Toddler puzzles are a fantastic educational tool and entertainment device. But not all toddler puzzles are equal! Here are a few things to consider as you work your way from stacking rings to multi-pieces.
Stacking Rings
I don’t know about you, but this stacking ring toy scares the crap out of me. When your newly crawling kid is just getting the hang of it, he/she is collapsing all over the place. They plop down, fall over from sitting positions, and roll around. Do you really want a wooden skewer lying around, waiting for your kid to impale onto it?
Yes, this toy has been around forever. No, there are no wives tales about the baby who lost an eye playing with the ring stacker. But, given our advancements with plastics and all, doesn’t this version seem safer?
The peg is no longer intimidating, it’s a bit more flexible, and definitely doesn’t elicit thoughts of eye-busting. In this particular case, the disadvantage is that the bigger rings may be harder to grasp for younger children.
Shape Sorters
There are a many types of sorters, but the basic gist is there’s a bunch of shapes, and there’s a sorter, and the kid is supposed to put the shapes back into the sorter. You’ll notice that a lot of plastic shapes have tiny holes in them. According to Green Toys, that’s because…
A few bits of wisdom to consider:
- Some sorters require parental involvement to retrieve the pieces. At some point, the kid will find it more entertaining to have you open and close the sorter, than to actually put the shapes into their respective holes.
- Within 3 minutes of extracting a shape sorter from its packaging, the shapes will be dispersed across your home. It’s a fact: shape sorter components expand to fill the space they’re in. Within a week, you’ll have just the sorter and 1 purple circle.
- There’s no “standard size” shape; however, if you’re going to end up with many of these, given the shape dispersion rule, do your best to match shape sizes across different sorters. That way, the orange square from sorter B will also fit in sorter A.
- There is a range of complexity in understanding shapes. Obviously, a circle is easier to grok than a star; it’s just something to keep in mind when determining what’s age appropriate. A study out of Uppsala University investigated which shapes are most difficult to sort for young children. It found that cylinders and square were consistently easiest to sort at all ages; and that at round 22 months, there was a huge increase in competency.
Fit-The-Piece Toddler Puzzles
Melissa & Doug call this a Sound Puzzle. I’ll call it a Fit-The-Piece Puzzle. You dump out the animals, and then fit them back into their designated shapes. As each animal is put in its home, the board (assuming it has batteries) sounds out the respective animal noise. The sound is a nice added touch, but there are plenty of these puzzle boards that are sound-free. These puzzles can get pretty extensive, with versions numbers 1-20, the alphabet, and the alphabet with slots for both uppercase and lowercase characters. They make a great first foray from infant puzzles to the more complex toddler puzzles.
The great thing about the M&D Sound Puzzle is that even after the child has perfected it, it’s still fun. The laughing zebra is funny even after the hundredth go. It’s still a useful mini-lesson hearing the distinction between the trumpet and the tuba. Also, as these puzzle pieces are fewer, bigger, and have a designated resting place, they’re less likely to get lost.
Beware the Laughing Zebra
You won’t discover the very small downside until it’s late at night. As you turn the lights off in the nursery or play room, you’re suddenly surprised by a laughing zebra! You turn the lights on to look around, see no zebra, turn them off, and there it is again. These puzzles have light sensors. When an unfilled zebra slot sees the light turn off, it thinks the puzzle piece is set down, triggering the sound activation. The implication is that placing the zebra piece inside the zebra slot is not necessary for triggering the sound. Or in other words, putting the parrot inside the elephant triggers the elephant sound. At first, this can be a little confusing for the kid until they get the hang of putting the pieces back in the right spots.
As the kid graduates to more complex puzzles of this nature, the pieces get smaller, which means they’re more likely to disappear. An alphabet puzzle is a fantastic educational tool, but if you have to skip K and Q, it loses some of its luster.
One other thing to consider with these fit-the-piece puzzles is that there is a variety. You can find animals instruments, vehicles, tools, shapes, etc… It’s nice to have a variety as it exposes your kids to different content, and you can start to see if one sticks more than the rest.
Latches, Buckles & Lights
A next level of difficulty graduates you to toddler puzzles that are more mechanical: clasps, latches, buckles, buttons, zippers, hooks, and more. M&D offer a couple of these, but if you search around for “busy boards,” you’ll find a ton of DIY projects.
Ringing a bell and clasping a latch offer very different levels of difficulty, which means that this sort of puzzle will stay relevant for a while. Growing up, my dad made one of these for me, except instead of zippers and buttons, it was light switches, resistor knobs, buzzers and motors. He drew out a schematic involving many Radio Shack components, and when you closed certain combinations of circuits, LED lights would turn on. It remained cool well into elementary school, then again when studying physics in high school, and then again as a parent thinking about fun projects to build for the kids. It’s the sort of tech an anti-tech parent would probably be ok with.
“Real” Toddler Puzzles
These are the toddler puzzles as we know them: a bunch of pieces that interlock with each other to form an image. When you first start, you’re working with 6-12 pieces; by the age of 3, these puzzles may be more like 12-36 pieces; and by age 5, 36-100+ pieces. Those are rough guidelines at best.
Some pearls of wisdom in this category…
Bags…
Disney, and probably many other brands, sell puzzles-in-a-bag. It looks like this…
If a puzzle comes in a bag, it’s virtually guaranteed that the pieces will not be flat. They will be bent and concave, making it impossible to do the puzzle. As you connect one piece, the other pieces pop out of position.
At $4, it’s a cheap gift – but it’s annoying as hell to put these together.
Boxes…
Another painful puzzle predicament is the puzzles-in-a-box, emphasis on the plural puzzles.
In this case, there are 4-6 puzzles in one box. Each puzzle piece has a specific symbol or color on its back, so you know to which puzzle each piece belongs. It’s a good value; however, the pieces will easily commingle in the box, which means you have to separate things out whenever this is used.
If you go this route, one suggestion for staying organized is to keep the pieces in separate plastic bags.
Trains…
Another type of puzzle is the extremely long one, like 10+ feet long!
This is a great puzzle in that the pieces are very big, easier to manipulate, and makes the experience a lot more physical: the kid actually has to get up and move around to push pieces into place. The downside is that a 10 foot long puzzle needs like 40 square feet of clear floor space.
It’s a slippery slope to the insane puzzles, but hopefully you’ve got a good start here!
