Children can learn and enjoy puzzles that require physical manipulation, vision, or thinking. Examples include jigsaw puzzles, sliding puzzles, word searches, hidden pictures, and rebuses. Age-appropriate options range from nursery rhymes to historical events and famous people.
Many children enjoy and learn by doing puzzles, and there are a number of age-appropriate types of puzzles for children. Some puzzles for kids require physical manipulation, while others rely on vision or thinking for solutions.
Puzzles for children that require manipulation include jigsaw puzzles. Puzzles usually consist of a base and pieces of wood or other material that fit into an indented area of the base. Young children’s puzzles commonly show scenes from nursery rhymes or stories, food, numbers, the alphabet, animals, and people in different occupations. Favorite TV characters can also be depicted.
Puzzles for older children include scenes from famous films, various places from around the world, historical events and famous people. There are also puzzles involved in a game context, such as those that give clues to solving a mystery.
Sliding puzzles are small plastic cases that hold pieces of a picture divided into squares, often 8 pieces, with a blank space. One piece can be moved at a time and the child tries to move the pieces into the right relationship to show the whole picture. A Rubik’s Cube® is another puzzle where the puzzler slides the pieces to move them into a different juxtaposition, in this case to arrange the colors.
Vision-based puzzles for kids include word searches. Depending on the age you are aiming for, the words are embedded in a series of letters with the letters arranged in one or more directions. For younger children, words only appear from left to right, but for older children, words can run vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, and in both directions.
A variety of hidden picture puzzles are available, from the shy mouse hiding in the book A Mouse in the House to Where’s Waldo? book series. Puzzles in which two images with subtle differences must be compared to find out what has changed from one to the other are a third type of puzzle that relies on vision. A fourth type of visual puzzle, sometimes called “What’s wrong with this picture?” — shows a scene where nonsense or inappropriate things are shown, such as animals wearing clothes, objects upside down, or objects placed in silly situations.
Rebuses require both vision and thinking, as children must figure out what the pictures represent and combine that with the meaning of the words to make sense of the puzzle. Other thinking puzzles for kids include riddles, simple codes they can solve, and brain twisters.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
