Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums puzzles

Shellymos - my DS5 is the same. He had little interest in regular jigsaw puzzles, but he always like the online versions. I remember when he was a toddler he liked the thomas the tank engine puzzles: thomas puzzles and games

I teach all of mine to match the colors. Melissa and Doug have "floor puzzles" that start at 24 pieces. I don't worry about edges, they figure that out later. Just have your child look for the two purple pieces etc. They catch on pretty quick, gifties and NDs.

Oh I hated, hated, hated, puzzles when I was a kid! Everyone was always trying to get me to do puzzles, but I just did not have the patience for it. It is funny because DD loves puzzles. I will do them now with her, but I still loose interest before her.

DD started doing the wooden knob puzzles as a baby and before we knew it she was doing real puzzles. I thought it was so amazing to watch her. She just takes a random piece puts it down and gets another. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how she dose it.

It is interesting when she was under two she would do them upside down. It did not seem to matter which way they were facing. Also now she will do like 10, 100 or 200 piece puzzles in a row, but will very rarely do the 1000-1500 piece puzzles unless there is a group of us working on it and it is something with princesses or castles.

She fills our kitchen with large floor puzzles and our table with little puzzles. She always wants me to take pictures of her puzzles before I can take them apart. I found myself sweeping the puzzles the other day because they were covering the floor for like 3 days, and I thought this is just odd. If anyone stopped by, I would just say she really likes puzzles.

If you really want her to do them, have the adults do a really cool one and if she joins in great. My husbands family really turned me onto puzzles over the years.

Ds8 was always a good puzzler, I don't remember having to show him much, but I did work the puzzles with him often. He still enjoys I Spy books and Where's Waldo - the sort of 'find little bits with your eyes' games which have always excited him.

DD2.5 is good at puzzles too, but not quite as instinctive as her brother. When starting on the wooden tray puzzles I would encourage her to keep trying by telling her to 'turn it, turn it, turn it...' just a little chant so she'd get that it was an ongoing thing - you don't just try once or twice and give up.
On the flat puzzles, she engages when we are working on an interesting part like a character face/eyes/nose, but then sort of wanders off while I 'finish up' the border (boring!) parts.

Actually, that's sort of my preferred mode too...

Well DD19mo may be a little more into puzzles. She is great at the peg ones and got into them pretty early. She also is great at the shape sorter ones. Haven't tried any jigsaw ones, but I will have to do that sometime and see what she thinks.

The only puzzles my son liked were word puzzles. He never wanted to do jigsaw puzzles but would occasionally do them online.

Our DS4 liked puzzles starting at around age 2. To this day, though, he still doesn't do them edge first. In fact, I have the hardest time getting him to pay attention even to the picture. He seems to look only at the shape of the pieces and then find the ones that fit together. To be honest, I have no idea how he manages to do this. What is clear, though, is that A) he likes them and B) he likes to do them his own way. Early on you can help by surreptitiously putting some relevant pictures nearby so that things work out.

BB

I wonder if this is like my DS7's crazy ability to spot 4-leafed clovers, BBDad.

The kid collected something like 75 (?) 4- and even 5-leaf clovers one year a couple of years ago. We have them pressed in our dictionary. I don't know how he did it. It's not that our yard has any more of them than anywhere else. Several times he and I looked at the same spot of clover starting at the same moment, and within seconds, he's spotted one and I have not. Sometimes he'd spot 2 or 3 and I still wouldn't have seen one. Same patch of clover.

It's a weird talent, but it clearly is a talent!

I asked my son how he was able to do this, and he couldn't tell me. It just seemed to be part of the package with him. I don't know if he can still do it. He wasn't as into it this past summer, and I never asked him to look. But it was sure uncanny at the time!

ooohh... I think you should see if he can find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow next. I, myself, am still looking.

Kriston, he is probably secretly Irish (if not out and out irish

I was wondering the same about that 'I spy' ability to find things, I figure it's got to help with puzzling...actually dd is very quick with that as well.

This is pretty far 'ot', but I was reminded of this odd story: my PG brother was working on a fishing boat post college, pre grad school and was working nets with some other men in low light. He was doing fine, so someone asked how long he'd been doing it and he responded just a few days. Then out of the blue they asked if he was color blind. He was kind of floored. He is color blind but usually it's not at all obvious to other people. The co-worker said he'd known one other person really who just took to bringing in the nets in low light, also color blind. Seems they just had better vision for that particular task under those conditions than most other folks. Really interesting to me. Never thought color blindness had any benefits, but I guess a lot of 'differences' have their up-sides!
I suppose his gtness probably didn't hurt either in finding efficiencies not obvious to others. <--- maybe that *is* on topic.