<p>I teach music. Today I was trying to describe something to a student by comparing to a jigsaw puzzle…“and you know how when you put together a puzzle, you’ll have certain sections all done but not connected together, and other little pieces lying about…”</p>
<p>And the little girl looked at me and said, “No, I don’t know, I’ve never done one of those puzzles.”</p>
<p>This is coming from an upper middle class, intelligent, middle-school age girl. I thought everyone would have been exposed to a puzzle!! I feel like I’m losing my mind.</p>
<p>They still sell wooden puzzles in upscale “educational” toy stores and probably in the chain toy stores too. i am sure they are still current in nursery schools as well. Your music student may have had puzzles like that when she was little and just not remember!</p>
<p>I was referring to a 500+ piece cardboard flat puzzle. Doesn’t everyone have one of these stowed in their “game” closet? Leftover from grandmas or rainy vacation? Are these things such a part of the past that today’s generation has never been exposed to them?</p>
<p>doubleplay, it’s a tradition in our house to get a new ‘family’ puzzle every Christmas, and everyone helps put it together on Boxing Day (12/26). We’ve done this since my eldest, who is now 26, was 2. We love the Charles Wysocki puzzles! Many of our friends do puzzles with their families, often at a summer cottage or a ski house. How sad that that child had never done a puzzle!</p>
<p>We’ve got a few, but our “kids” are now 17 and 20 and I haven’t seen them pull one off the shelf this past decade. My son liked the enormous 1000-piece or more 3D puzzles made out of foam for a short while. With Wii and the handheld electronic games catering to an ever younger market segment, perhaps it is time to update your analogies.</p>
<p>I think the multi-hundred-piece ones are much less widespread than the little-kid ones; I have seen them at resorts in the rainy-day rooms, and in museum gift store catalogues. I’ve done them occasionally and seem to recall my children doing them too, but I suspect they are a much more specialized interest, precisely because they are more difficult than the simpler children’s kind. I suppose they are going the way of paper dolls. No noise, no animation, no obvious excitement.</p>
<p>BassDad, LOL. I already use the analogy “when you can play this section smoothly from start to finish, you’re ready for the next <em>level</em>” </p>
<p>I would REALLy love to have a little hand held device that plays the weird sound a video game makes when Mario gets “killed” or falls off the wall, or whatever (you know the sound I’m talking about? Sort of descending tones?). I could really get good use out of it during lessons (and make <em>mistakes</em> more humorous)! Some kids are so uptight about mistakes, they can’t let go and enjoy playing!</p>
<p>If someone invented a cheap little hand held thing like that and marketed it through music teaching catalogs, they’d probably make a fortune. :)</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a fluke. Many kids of all socioeconomic seem plugged in to the latest computer or videogame for their entertainment. At least some still read books!</p>
<p>I usually give a few of these(500) to my kids around Christmas because they are dirt cheap. The only problem is they don’t always finish them and these puzzles do take up a lot of space.</p>
<p>You know what else they can’t do? They can’t weave! I am a teacher and we were making miniature rugs as part of Native American studies, and I could not believe how many of them did not understand how to do this. Once they did understand the simple up and down pattern, they often had trouble making the next row because they didn’t alternate the pattern on the subsequent row…so the previous row would unravel! I guess none of them have ever made pot holders before! I made a ton of those when I was a kid!</p>
<p>Well I’ll be 50 in a few months and I don’t know how to weave either! But I did do lots of giant jigsaw puzzles with a friend. One was a huge, round, solid red one called “Little Red Riding Hood’s Red Cloak”, and another was a Jackson Pollock painting. :)</p>
<p>Maybe you need a few in your lesson waiting area. And an elementary one for the preschool sibs. I can’t imagine raising kids without puzzles…sheesh.</p>
<p>We had these on the dining room table every holiday for years. D1 was a particular fiend for them - the rest of us were just methodical pluggers (sort and try). Haven’t had one for the last few years but maybe I’ll try again at Christmas.<br>
Meanwhile, had a screaming game of Tetris with D2 on someone’s borrowed game station. I kept messing up with the buttons, nearly peed my pants before I gave up because it was all so funny</p>
<p>My father used to always have a puzzle going on the kitchen counter. The end of the counter was round and very large. I think he did that so he could keep tabs on us. He’d be up at night putting the puzzles together when we’d get home from a date or work and we’d gravitate to the puzzle and him and start to work in it… we had some good conversations over those puzzles. It was a pretty crafty way of keeping in touch with us and making sure we were home on time.</p>
<p>I teach preschool. We put puzzles out everyday for the kids. Some love it. Some find it to be an exercise in frustration. i have always loved puzzles.</p>
<p>I used them daily in a First and Second grade classroom for the last 20 minutes. It totally relaxed the kids so they could handle the busses. After all the work was cleared and packed up, we brought out 6 different ones at different levels, and the kids gravitated to any one they wanted. They could talk pleasantly over them, and they naturally invited cooperation. The kid who didn’t like to socialize much waited to see where nobody else went, then made a bee-line to do the empty table. Meanwhile, I could talk with individual children or write individual notes. Rare were the fights or behavior tiffs when there were plenty of puzzles to choose from. </p>
<p>Adults would walk by and just beam, looking in. THe math coordinator thought it was wonderful. The literacy coordinator and spec ed teachers thought it helped kids with early decoding skills.</p>
<p>I just liked it. Maybe 20% of kids (poor) did them at home, but more likely with grandma than with ma.</p>
<p>At October parent conferences, when people asked how they could help their kid do better in school, among other things I encouraged puzzles as Christmas presents. I did so especially for first graders having trouble catching on to reading, or with attention problems, since puzzles seemed to occupy them for more than the usual 15 minute time limit and extend their concentration on tasks.</p>
<p>P3T, that sounds like a terrific idea. One of my favorite things in kindergarten was doing the map of the states jigsaw.</p>
<p>What did you do with the puzzles between times? Did you have space enough that they could come back the next day and pick up where they left off? Or were they small enough that the kids could finish and you could just put them away.</p>
<p>conyat, you reminded me of a funny story talking about the map of the states jigsaw. When S1 was 2 years old we bought the Playskool wooden state map puzzle. I used to sit with S and tell him the names of the states as we put the puzzle back together. Each state piece had the name of the state written on it, but obviously he was too young to read. So imagine my amazement when one day he picked up a piece and said “Florida”. Of course I thought he was brilliant, but then again, Florida is a pretty distinctively shaped state. But I handed him another piece and darn if he didn’t get it right, too! Over the course of a few days, I realized that he could identify every single state just by looking at the puzzle piece! He could even do it when the pieces were upside down (no writing, no color, all gray). Of course, I was sure I had a genius on my hands then </p>
<p>What really cracked me up was a few weeks later when he was sitting in his high chair and took a bite out of his piece of toast, held it up in the air and studied it, then said “Texas!”. Sure enough, it looked almost exactly like the shape of Texas. </p>
<p>Puzzles were key to his learning style and he enjoyed working them throughout his childhood. Some kids just learn ‘spatially’ and he was one of them.</p>
<p>We have friends with much younger kids than ours…a few years back, when there oldest was about 4, they ran into a snag with their daycare being closed and they both had to be at work. Not my usual gig, but I went over and hung out (i.e. babysat) for a couple of days. I was always very anti-video games, always insisted that any computer games be educational, etc. His dad was way into video games, and the kid was an expert at some games that I thought were WAY too violent. I was surprised when I found at the bottom of his toy box, under all the violent action-figures and cars, a U.S. puzzle. He was a really sharp little kid back then, and he pointed out the puzzle pieces for Colorado, where his aunt lived, and Virginia, where his g-parents lived. Cool…I was really impressed—hey, maybe they aren’t messing this kid up as badly as I feared. Then, he takes the puzzle pieces of Oklahoma in one hand and Florida in the other, and “shoots” me with them. (BTW, earlier this summer, 6 years later we vacationed with that family–now with 3 kids–) That kid who shot me with the panhandle of Oklahoma, is a great kid—extremely bright, and a joy to be around. Oh well.</p>
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