The Power of Puzzles
Walk into any preschool or elementary school classroom, and you’re likely to see children working on a jigsaw puzzle. Teachers often use puzzles as an activity for early finishers, as a transition activity between traditional classwork, or as a fun activity for rainy day recess. But are puzzles just a good way to keep kids busy? Absolutely not. There’s so much more happening than meets the eye.
Improving Focus & Attention Span
Completing a puzzle takes dedicated focus. While attention spans grow naturally as children mature, puzzles offer an excellent space to practice and develop those skills.
In a digital world of constant stimulation, opportunities to practice prolonged concentration are more important than ever.
Perseverance in Problem Solving
As children put together a puzzle, they’re putting their problem solving skills to work. Looking for clues like shape, color, and context, children have to narrow down a multitude of possibilities to find that perfect fit.
This process involves repeated attempts with lots of failed solutions along the way. As children work through these failures to a completed puzzle, they’re learning perseverance in problem-solving.
Social-Emotional Learning
The process of solving a puzzle gives children lots of opportunities to practice social skills and emotional regulation.
What do you do when your friend has the piece you need? How do you handle the dilemma when your section and a classmate’s section need to connect? How do you cope with the frustration of pieces crumbling apart when you try to move a completed section you’ve been working on?
And the worst: how do you overcome the awful feeling when after all that hard work, the final puzzle piece is nowhere to be found? These scenarios offer safe opportunities to practice emotional regulation and social coordination with peers.
Visual-Spatial Skills
Looking at puzzle pieces is more than just seeing. As children process all the visual information involved in puzzle solving, they’re building those visual-spatial skills in ways you might not realize.
Visual analysis - recognizing patterns
Visual memory - seeing the shape of a puzzle piece and keeping it in memory long enough to compare to another possible fit
Visual discrimination - recognizing similarities and differences in shape
Visual closure - identifying an object when you can only see a part of it (like recognizing a dog by seeing only its ear on a puzzle piece)
Motor Skills
Puzzles certainly build fine motor skills. As students work to fit pieces together without breaking or bending them, they’re building fine motor control control and strength in their fingers and hands.
But did you know that puzzles also build gross motor skills? That’s right! Those same skills involved in big movements like running and balancing are also exercised during puzzle building.
Students are often on the floor, naturally pushing students to lean and balance their bodies over the puzzle for prolonged time periods, building strength and control. When grabbing a piece from the right or left, students are encouraged to naturally cross the midline (read more about that here).
Do you have puzzles in your home or classroom? If not, it’s always a good time to start.
