Super Charge Your Family Time: 10 Benefits to Putting Together a Puzzle
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A Puzzling Activity: Bonding Over a Family Challenge!
Getting your family together for game night just got a whole more captivating with puzzle solving. Puzzles are a great way to teach children important life skills such as communication, collaboration, and problem solving. They are an ideal activity to engage the minds of all because they come in many types, sizes, and difficulty levels.
Enjoy laughter, conversations, and unbreakable bonds that are created while completing that final piece.
I have long touted the benefits of playing games with children.
I even wrote a blog all about collaborative games.
What I have not covered is the power of the puzzle.
Here are 10 benefits to putting together a puzzle with your children:
1. Quality Family Time
Whether you are able to carve out regular good “chunks” of family time or only can find 15-20 minutes here and there, puzzles provide a great opportunity for parents and children to come together.
The glory of the puzzle is that you can set it up on a card table in a corner of a room and leave it for days, weeks, or months.
This enables your family to come back to it in smaller portions of time.
As the pieces fit together, so too, does the bond between your family members.
2. Problem Solving
Did you know that there are two different types of problem solving?
Each is very important.
Many people excel at one type and have difficulty with the other.
Puzzles help sharpen your skills at both!
Individual Problem Solving:
This is what everyone thinks of when the term problem solving is mentioned.
Puzzles help children to think critically, analyze patterns, identify connections, and develop logical thinking skills.
These are all components of problem solving.
Collective Problem Solving:
Some puzzles, especially larger or more complex ones, can be tackled by a group of individuals.
This is what your family will be doing.
This promotes collective problem solving.
It encourages effective communication, as team members need to convey their ideas and strategies to one another.
In many other situations, a person is encouraged to keep their strategy to themself.
With collective problem solving, it is crucial that strategies, ideas, and strengths of each individual are conveyed so they can be harnessed towards a common goal.
This also helps members of the family who do not see strategy as easily as others, learn how to strategize, identify connections, and think critically.
This may be hard to actually “see,” the difference between the two, without an example.
On the first day of school in each of my classes, I gave my students a group puzzle to solve at each of their tables.
Remember, I taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.
We had a 45 minute class session.
There were a couple of tables that never were able to complete the puzzle.
Granted, they only had about 25 minutes when you count all of the administrivia I had to do, where does everyone sit, who was absent, and my introduction.
I made a copy of that puzzle, with the instructions for you. Download it, it is FREE!
IMPROVE COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION
WITH A PUZZLE!
- Collaboration and Communication seem like “serious lessons” but Puzzles are fun!
- This activity helps children and adults alike clearly see the benefit of working together.
- Achieve a common goal.
- Use for just your family or a group of people.
- Comes with the puzzle shapes, the instructions for the person “administering the puzzle,” and the instructions for the people putting the puzzle together.
5 Squares
16 pieces
What do group members need?
A puzzle of fun!
The rules are very important, someone reads these to the group.
There are many shapes.
The objective is with the shapes, create 5 equally sized squares.
I love this puzzle because it says a lot about the individual problem solvers, the collective problem solvers, who can follow instructions, and who gets easily frustrated.
3. Patience and Persistence
If your family is completing a traditional jigsaw puzzle, it requires a lot of persistence and patience.
This is why I love having an area set up with the puzzle always “out” available.
Each piece must be examined to see what kind of shape or pattern it has, what colors it has, so that your child can determine where it goes.
For example, one strategy is to separate all of the “straight edges” first and put together the frame or border.
This is what I do.
I then organize all of those “insiders” by color type.
Have you ever painted a room?
It feels like all of the prep work, the making or taping off switches and edging the ceiling or baseboards is the most tedious work.
However, by doing this, the “big job” of painting the room goes by so much faster.
Patience and Persistence are life skills.
We live in a society of everything is available now (heck you can get almost anything delivered to you the next day)!
There used to be a generation called the “Now Generation.”
I think “they” whoever they are, gave up, because the term was redundant and applied to every generation that followed.
By working a puzzle together, children learn how to presevere through challenges and not to give up easily.
This can be a “baby” lesson in resilience! Which parents are always looking for.
They also learn the value of patience.
Not only because, often the puzzle is not complete in one day, or a week, or even a month, but also because your child must often be patient with finding the right piece.
These are both essential skills for success in personal and professional settings as your child grows older.
4. Sense of Accomplishment:
Completing a puzzle provides a tangible sense of achievement.
This feeling of success can be particularly important for self-esteem, and self-confidence.
As you work on a puzzle, you set a clear goal-to finish it-and as you make progress and eventually finish it, you experience a sense of mastery.
This feeling of accomplishment can boost your child’s overall morale and motivate them to take on other challenges.
5. Improve Visual Spatial Skills:
This is often overlooked.
Let’s face it, our kiddos are not “rewarded,” “tested,” or even really taught visual spacial skills in school.
Yet as soon as you teach them how to parallel park, you will realize this is a very important skill!
Visual spatial skills involve understanding and manipulating visual information about the spatial relationship between objects.
Many puzzles, such as jigsaw puzzles, require you to analyze and fit pieces together in a specific way.
This process engages your brain in tasks like recognizing patterns, shapes, and orientation.
Over time, practicing these skills through puzzles can enhance your ability to navigate spaces, read maps, (uh-yeah, I know that isn’t much of a thing anymore), and read blueprints or plan and design large projects.
These are necessary skills in professional fields such as construction, architecture, and engineering.
6. Boosts Creativity:
Puzzles provide an excellent opportunity for children to express their creativity.
Hmmm, at first I had a hard time seeing this, after all, the picture is already created.
When children are putting together a puzzle, they have to use their imagination to visualize how the final picture will look.
Because what they have is incomplete, their minds are “filling in the blanks.”
You can also buy jigsaw puzzles that inspire children to explore new topics and develop a deeper understanding of the world around them.
I am thinking of the Taj Mahal.
You could do the puzzle, then do a lesson on the new seven wonders of the world, or the effects of tourism to an economy, or air pollution (the Taj Majal is turning yellow, it is said due to pollution), or a geography lesson, or you could do an introductory lesson to India.
! the possibilities are endless, my creativity is flowing and I haven’t even looked at the puzzle yet.
7. Improves Focus and Concentration:
I love games for parents to teach important skills without having to seem like it is a “lesson” or the kids are “in school.”
Puzzles are like goldmines for parents looking for ways to help their children improve focus and concentration.
Just the act of putting together a puzzle requires intense focus and concentrations each piece must be carefully examined, matched with its corresponding shape, and then placed in the correct location.
This process helps to sharpen the mind and improve attention to detail.
8. Fine Motor Skills:
I had two amazing boys.
I was a teacher, K-12 certified.
You would think I would know what the kiddos should know for their kindergarten “entrance” exam.
That is what I called it.
Here in Arizona, each child is tested in April or May before their Kindergarten year to show where they are “at” on some scale of Kindergarten readiness.
Well, both, (not one-I didn’t learn the first time) of my boys “failed” fine motor skills.
How is this evaluated?
They were supposed to cut on a line, and stay on the line, with scissors.
Like who in their right mind gives 5 year old boys scissors, is what I was thinking…uh 2 times!
Oh had I known!
Puzzles help with those fine motor skills.
Picking up and playing with the pieces hones these skills in younger children.
This helps with their hand-eye coordination, dexterity, and finger strength.
All of these skills are very important for writing, coloring, and drawing.
The stuff I did expect them to do in Kindergarten.
9. Engages Both Sides of Your Brain:
Puzzles often require a balance between left-brain and right-brain thinking.
The left side of your brain, which is associated with logical and analytical thinking is activated when you’re solving the structure or organization of the puzzle.
Meanwhile, the right side of your brain, which is related to creative thinking and intuition, comes into play when you’re making connections, thinking outside the box, and coming up with innovative solutions.
Engaging both sides of your brain can help improve your overall cognitive abilities and creativity.
10. Communication and Cooperation:
Puzzles encourage effective communication as team members need to convey their ideas and strategies to one another.
Kids learn to share ideas, delegate tasks, and help one another when needed.
As they work on a puzzle together, team puzzlers need to express their thoughts and ideas.
They might ask questions, make suggestions, or provide instructions to one another.
This verbal interaction enhances their communication skills, helping them articulate their thoughts clearly and effectively.
They also need to learn good listening skills.
Effective communication is a two-way street.
Kids learn to listen actively to their siblings or peers’ ideas, which is a crucial aspect of good communication.
They need to comprehend instructions and be attentive to their teammates’ suggestions.
These interpersonal skills are vital for their social development.
Research on puzzles:
There is research concerning the elderly and crosswords, sudoko, and memory.
However, Marcel Danesi, Ph.D. worked with children and saw amazing benefits using puzzles.
He wanted legitimate research to back his findings. He went to find them.
He wrote an entire blog about his findings and his experience, if you are interested, in the science of puzzles.
He is so infatuated and convinced in the power of the puzzle, he has also authored two books on the subject.
Put the tablets away and take a break from screens with the ultimate family challenge – putting a puzzle together!
Here’s why bonding over a puzzle provides 10 valuable benefits you won’t get elsewhere.
Get ready to unlock your family’s potential – one piece at a time!
Be sure to catch the blog in January about all of the different types of puzzles your child can do and the benefits of each!