Puzzle Love

David's newest passion is jigsaw puzzles! I find this pretty fascinating, because in pretty typical 2-year old boy fashion, he has a case of "ants in his pants" most days and things rarely hold his focus for long periods of time. However, puzzles have found his interest. He usually begs me to "play puzzles" at least 4 or 5 times a day, whips them out one right after the other, and has them lined up perfectly completed next to each other to display his accomplishment. I am trying to jump on this interest and keep my eye out for cheap puzzles wherever I come across them such as dollar spots or garage sales and also be creative with coming up with other problem solving activities!

Here are a couple of other fun activities and games he likes right now.....

ABC Puzzle matching lower case with upper case magnets. I adapted this idea from from a parenting magazine I read a couple of months ago. The magazine suggested gluing letters to bottle caps. That seemed a little tedious for me, and fragile for my boys. So I just printed lower case letters in different colors, cut circles around them and glued them to construction paper, and then glued the paper to a cookie sheet so the magnets would stick. Then packing tape over the top to protect the paper and a pack of package of alphabet magnets from the dollar spot, and we have a fun game!

We originally used these counting bears for color sorting and counting of course. More recently we have been using them for patterning , and same or different.

You remember the original Barrel of Monkeys game! These monkeys are larger and numbered 1-10. This is challenging for him, since they definitely take coordination to hang them all together without one falling off as well as keeping them in the right numerical order!

Good ol cracker barrel favorite! We don't play the game. He just sticks the pegs in the tiny holes.

And last but not least, everyone's childhood favorite, tinker toys.