Jigsaw puzzle fun

Timeline : February 2018

Our few attempts of introducing Jigsaw puzzles when Anouk turned 2 years ended up in she biting off the edges of the jigsaw pieces, rather than solving the puzzle J So we had shelved it for a while and had kind of forgotten about it.

On a junior basket ball shopping trip to Decathlon at City Square mall, early February, we chanced upon a children's shop "My Greatest Child" with such an attractive line of Anouk's favourite Julia Donaldson (Axel Scheffler combo, in particular) collection. We were just browsing through the books when Arun saw some interesting looking jigsaw puzzles - the attractive features (for us) were (1) number - there were 4 puzzles in a box (2) size - each puzzle was roughly around 15cm x 10cm (3) number of pieces - varying from 9, 12, 15 and 20 piece puzzles, in a single box (4) sturdiness - the pieces looked quite sturdy and durable (might withstand a bit of Anouk's biting and chewing, we thought J). So we brought home one box, as below and decided to give her one puzzle at a time, starting with the smallest number of pieces.

4 sets of puzzles in a box - lion (9 pieces), bambies (12), elephants (15), leopards (20)  -
 each puzzle size : 15cm X 10.5cm

Anouk took to the puzzles quite instantly and we showed her a couple of times how to solve from an edge, any edge that seems easy for her and was eager to follow instructions and solving. After a week, we found that her dexterity has greatly improved and could make good sense of the piece shape and the fitting pattern. Slowly and steadily, she made her way through all the four puzzles.. One thing we found a bit perplexing, was she actually spends time to look at the original photograph initially, by slowly solving it by herself 2-3 times and then we see her solving the puzzle without looking at the original picture much. Both the parent creatures have difficulty remembering such random picture's jigsaw puzzle position and can not solve fast without looking at original picture, but may be kids are wired like that. J Anyways, turned out to be a great introduction and motivation for Anouk to continue with puzzle solving. Below are couple of videos of her solving the 9 piece and the 12 piece puzzles.
Update : 1 Mar 2018 - Added the 15 piece puzzle solving video.