Classic Entertainment With Childrens Jigsaw Puzzles

Childrens jigsaw puzzles will never grow old. They're too much fun and they teach well, too - which proves the very salient point that learning is always more rewarding than just chucking stuff around. Watch a child with the latest movie tie in toy and watch a child with a jigsaw. You'll see exactly what we mean.

The thing about jigsaw puzzles is, they're as tactile and interesting as a collection of pieces as they are rewarding as a finished picture. When a child starts playing with a jigsaw puzzle, he or she is just as interested in the individual shape and milling of the pieces he or she is using, as he or she is in the potential of those pieces to be put together to form a finished article. Then some kind parent or older kid points out that childrens jigsaw puzzles are made of several of these interesting shapes, which can be fitted together... the wonder on the child's face is a pleasure to behold. He or she will spend hours working out which bit fits with what other bits, until the picture is finally complete - and then quite happily smash the thing up in order to do it again.

No wonder childrens jigsaw puzzles are still classics. It's all about maintaining the interest of the player - in a way that a lot of modern toy ideas simply can't match. A child learns several very important things from playing with a jigsaw puzzle: things that translate as learning skills throughout their formative years. That's a sort of interaction that your latest cuddly toy TV character can't give. Example: when a child breaks up a jigsaw puzzle, and tries to put it back together again in different ways, he or she starts to learn how to differentiate between right and wrong solutions. Childrens jigsaw puzzles work by fitting shapes together in a particular way. When a child breaks one up and tries to put it together differently, he or she has used play to explore the properties of the jigsaw - and to realise that although the individual bits are made to fit with each other, there's only one "right" way for them all to fit.

That kind of mental training comes in extremely handy in later life, during maths classes, for example, or out doing the shopping. Money, after all, is just a pocket full of little pieces that can be put together to make a single sum - and you have to learn the ways to make the right sum if you're going to be any good at budgeting when you grow up. Childrens jigsaw puzzles impart the beginnings of that skill.

Children are often seduced by the bright colours and loud noises of the latest "fashion toy". Any parent will tell you, though, if you watch: they always go back to the puzzle toys. The jigsaws, the shapes in the boxes - the games and things that get their minds working. It's common knowledge that the logic of a child is much purer than that of an adult - their predilection for keeping useful learning toys classic suggests that the tastes of a child are more sophisticated, too.