Puzzle games and toys are a brilliant way to help your child’s development while having fun at the same time. They are great for teaching logical thinking, math and literacy, and all sorts of other great skills. The good thing is, they’re fun games, so the kids don’t feel like they are learning and they will engage with it more.
There are some great puzzle games and toys for children of all ages and you should try to introduce as many of them as possible. These are some of the best puzzle games and toys for kids.
Wooden Peg Puzzles
Wooden peg puzzles are a classic puzzle game for babies and young children. They’ve been around for years but they’re still just as good as any modern toys on the market because they are so simple. It just has a wooden peg with different notches on it and some shapes with various sized holes in it. Your child has to work out how to get the shape over the peg. This is a brilliant introduction to puzzle games because it helps them improve their hand-eye coordination skills and teaches them the basics of problem-solving through trial and error. To begin with, they will just keep putting the shapes in different ways until it goes on. But as they get older and their brain develops, they learn to look at the shape and work out which way it goes on before they try.
Word Puzzles
Reading and writing are so important and if you want to help your child develop their skills by supporting what they learn at school, word puzzles are perfect. You can get some great fill ins books with crosswords and simplified versions (follow the link to find out more) that are ideal for kids. Word puzzles are not suitable for younger children but as their reading ability improves, they can really help with things like spelling and recognizing sounds. The puzzle element also helps them improve their cognitive ability and critical thinking skills.
Rubik’s Cubes
The Rubik’s Cube is still one of the most iconic puzzles there is, and they are great for kids. They can be frustrating to solve but they really test your child’s brainpower and get them thinking logically about puzzles. In order to solve a Rubik’s Cube, you actually need to learn specific algorithms, and it’s a good way to get kids familiar with this idea and improve their math skills.
Video Games
There are plenty of people out there that will tell you video games are bad for kids, but that just isn’t true. In fact, there are so many amazing video games to play with kids and a lot of them are puzzle-based. Video games have been shown to help develop cognitive thinking skills through puzzles, and they’re great for hand-eye coordination. The storytelling elements are brilliant for improving their imagination too.
If you want to help your child develop in a fun way, these puzzle toys and games are perfect.