If you ask us what’s our kids favorite toy, we’d answer very fast: the giant floor puzzles for kids. You want to know why?
Before I elaborate more on this -as a side note- we bought our oldest her first farm giant puzzle when she was 2.5 years and these puzzles have also been our motivator to start our online toy shop www.toya.be. Now, 3 years later, we have around 6 or 7 giant floor puzzles for kids in our house.
These giant floor puzzles for kids are made of 30 pieces of sturdy colorful cardboard and they are significantly different that the traditional puzzles:
- They don’t have regular puzzle shapes
- The big chunk pieces of hard cardboard are easy to grab and handle for children hands,
- The different shapes enable children to puzzle not only based on the puzzle picture but also looking at the shape of the different available pieces.
- There are 8 of the pieces that are cut in the shape of different animals.
All these makes this giant puzzle more accessible than a normal 30-piece puzzle. Personally we introduced this puzzle at the age of 2,5 but we know of friends who did so even earlier.
Why we love these giant floor puzzles for kids so much? We love the big sturdy pieces of different shapes. On top the colorful and busy drawings give us the opportunity to puzzle in so many creative ways and get more out of our giant floor puzzles for kids than just an “ordinary” giant puzzle.
We love them because we found different ways of playing with these giant floor puzzles for kids. Most of the time puzzling gets down to opening a box of puzzle pieces and motivate the kids to try and make the puzzle from A to Z and providing some support when needed. That’s the basic idea of playing with a puzzle for kids.
The features of this giant floor puzzle for kids invite to do more than that. This is how we play with our giant floor puzzles:
- Adapt the giant puzzle for small kids: This is a great idea we got from friends. Their kid being too small for a 30-piece puzzle they chose to be play with it in a creative way. They’d make the puzzle, except for the 8 template pieces featuring the animals. They’d give them to their 2 year old kids and invite her to finish the giant puzzle. This way this giant puzzle can be played with in different ways at different stages of your kid’s development. When your kids is putting the ‘animal’ pieces in their places, you can name them and teach your kids the sound of each animal, …
- Do more than just puzzle: Making these giant floor puzzles for kids is only half the fun. Once the puzzle is done, we go on playing with it for 10-20 minutes or more describing and discussing with the kids the various elements and details on the puzzle. With questions like “we’re do you see a bird” (or an apple, or a worm, or a …) or “How many … do you see” we have our kids discover all elements of the puzzle. They simply love it!
We’ve probably haven’t discovered yet all possibilities ourselves. You play with this giant puzzle in a different way? Let us know.
About the puzzle and variants.
This Galt floor puzzle is originally from the UK and comes in various shapes among which the farm version we presented, but also a jungle or a construction yard version . In Belgium you’d find the puzzle in some of the smaller specialty toy stores and you can find it of course on our toy shop www.toya.be.
