We, as parents, completely understand the busyness of life these days. More often than not, we too find ourselves reaching for the tablet or a tv to occupy the kids for a few minutes while we clean up the kitchen, get ready for the day, tend to the needs of another child, get through the last leg of a road trip... Life happens & we know this first hand. Our hope is to find a way to implement something different every once in a while and we are hoping that can make an impact in our knowledge seeking and ever-growing kids.
There is an incredible amount of research linking the benefits of puzzles (and memory game play) with your growing and ever-evolving child. Not only does it help your little one physically, cognitively and emotionally grow, playing together with these educational tools, can improve the relationship you have with your children. Your Salt of the Earth Kids puzzles and games are small and easy to carry - bring them on road trips, to a restaurant, or even take them out between games at tournaments.
as written on teach.com:
The three basics of what puzzles do for your child
When your child is alone with a puzzle you can expect three basic skills to be built:
Physical skills -- from holding puzzle pieces and turning them until they fit
Cognitive skills -- as they solve the problems of a puzzle
Emotional skills -- they learn patience and are rewarded when they complete the puzzle
These three basic skills are the building blocks for a well rounded person. As Nancy Maldonado states in an article , puzzles allow “an opportunity for young children to focus on an activity that has an ending,” completing the pleasing image.
In addition to these three basics, doing a puzzle with a friend or family member also allows for the growth of social skills as they work together and communicate about what fits where. This is a minor point as nearly any activity done with more than one person will have this benefit.
Looking at the specific skills behind the three basics
Each of the three basics break down further into specific skills that a puzzle can build for your child. I’ll look at them in point form under each heading, for further reading check out this article from Parenting Today or this one from B -- Inspired Mama.
Physical skills
Hand-Eye Coordination -- your child will develop a keen relationship between what their eyes see, what their hands do and what their brain relates to this information.
Gross Motor Skills -- Larger puzzle pieces and stacking puzzle games can enhance the large movements of your child to the point where they can then work on their fine motor skills.
Fine Motor Skills -- small and precise movements, such as the movement of fingers to get a puzzle piece in exactly the right spot, are built and can lead to better handwriting and typing skills.
Cognitive skills
Understanding the surrounding world -- there is no better way for your child to gain an understanding of the world around them than by letting them literally manipulate the world around them.
Shape recognition -- the first puzzles we use are simple shapes -- triangle, squares and circles. From there more complex shapes are used until the abstract jigsaw puzzles are used.
Memory -- Your child has to remember the shape of pieces that don’t fit fir when they will fit later on.
Problem solving -- Either the puzzle piece fits or it does not. Your child uses critical thinking skills to solve the puzzle and, best of all, you can’t cheat a puzzle!
Emotional skills
Setting goals -- The first goal is to solve the puzzle, the next goal will be a series of strategies your child comes up with to solve the puzzle. Such as putting familiar shapes or colors in one pile for future reference.
-
Patience -- Puzzles are not like sports, you can’t just step up to the plate and swing until you knock it out of the park. You must practice patience and slowly work through the puzzle before you reach the ending.
Memory games improve a variety of skills within your child as well. (source)
- Helps to Enhance Other Brain Functions – If someone plays a brain enhancing game daily, he/she can easily enhance brain skills, like attention level, concentration, focus, intellectual skills along with the reading and writing part of it. For memory games are developed with efforts to allow the human brain to think critically.
- Helps To Boost The Brain – As the level of the game increases everytime, you deal with a higher difficulty level that helps to boost the brain. Properly exercising your brain helps to reduce the memory loss too.
- Best Brain Exercise- Memory games are best brain exercises that exercise certain parts of the human body. Continuously playing these games makes human brain more sharp comparatively to that of those who don’t play games often. Well, the time duration is not that important, rather playing the same game continuously. Try to maintain consistency as you play the memory game.
- Memory Games Stimulate Your Minds- Playing memory games helps to respond immediately with no time to any kind of situation.
- Enhance Visual Discrimination- Training your visual memory is also important at the same time, for you to distinguish between two objects. You must immediately be able to find difference between pictures and not take too long time to identify things in normal time.
- Enhance Power Of Recognition- Power of recognition can be increased with the help of better memory games. Unless and until you do not put any efforts in the games you play, you wont be able to enhance your power of recognition.
- Increase Short Memory- Research has found that people solving puzzles, crosswords, play card games deferred the attack of dementia.
- Improves Creativity- Flexibility is responsible for problem-solving and reasoning. Better problem solving, greater adaptability to change, and more creative thinking. While certain types of reasoning wants you to use the information in the problem to solve it, the other type is about detecting similarities and patterns in order to create new source of information.
- Teaches you Planning and Foresight- The area of the brain responsible for judgement, self-control, planning is enhanced more, if you play memory games continuously. Of course these games push you to make better decisions than the ones you made prior to this.
- Improve Vocabulary- If you play games like catch a word, it helps to improve your vocabulary.