The Puzzle Meister

Bentley has done puzzles for quite some time now. Maybe even a year. I could look back through our daily photo journal and see when we first started capturing him working on puzzles, but I would get distracted by all the cute photos and never finish this blog post, so I'm going to just guess that it was around a year ago.

At first he required lots of help. Sometimes he would direct us to do the puzzle for him. It entertained him. Anything that entertains him also entertains us. He's that fun to be with.

Now he spends lengthy periods of time playing with puzzles on his own. Occasionally he asks for our help or assurance that he has a piece in the right place. His mom has collected quite a few nice wooden puzzles at garage sales. She's even purchased one or two at local toy stores. His cousins from Germany gave him a couple of nice puzzles when they visited last summer. Hmmm...if he was doing puzzles last summer, then it's been more than a year.

Is it time to start doing puzzles with Jake and Viva? The only interest they've shown so far is in eating the puzzle pieces. It's not going to be easy to get Bentley to share his puzzle collection with them. To date the puzzles have all been his only and we've encouraged him to keep them away from twins. Who wants chewed on or missing puzzle pieces?

I saved five puzzles from Kara's childhood. Three are more difficult ones and we've stored them away again because Mark and I got tired of doing them over and over for Bentley. Once is never enough for a two year old. Repetition is their favorite mode of learning--even if it's you doing the repetition. Maybe I should bring them back out and see if he can do them now without so much help.

On Sundays I have two Old Testament puzzle books that I take to sacrament meeting. Bentley spends twenty minutes or so doing those puzzles. One book is kind of tricky because it contains two sided puzzles. I have to make sure he has the puzzle pieces right side up.

I ordered two new Melissa and Doug puzzles from amazon this week. Melissa & Doug have an awesome line of puzzles. Most, but not all, of their puzzles are wooden. They sell peg puzzles--the kind that have little red pegs for little hands to hold onto and turn the puzzle piece to get it to fit. They sell puzzles in many different sizes, including floor puzzles. They sell 12 piece, 24 piece (I just ordered the African plains), 30 piece (an odd size), 48 piece (I want the rain forest one--my next amazon order!) and larger puzzles. They have many different themes--farm animals, pirate ships, sea life, dinosaurs, construction sites, horses, vehicles, the rain forest, etc. Most of their puzzles are around $10.

One of their better deals is $10 for a four pack of smaller (4.5" by 6.5") puzzles that come in a little wooden box with a divider to keep the pieces from the four different puzzles separated. Bentley has the vehicle set. There is a fire truck (his favorite puzzle in the set), a train (perhaps this is his favorite?), a school bus (a distant third), and a race car (not that popular with him). I've ordered him another set of puzzles like these, but this set has a dolphin, a shark, a sea horse, and fish. I chose this set because of an argument I had with him earlier this week. I showed him a photo of a dolphin and he insisted (repeatedly) that it was a shark. I'm hoping this puzzle set will help him refine his animal identification skills.

He's usually quite adept at identifying animals, although the other day I had to chuckle when he called a sea lion a tiger. He uses the words lion and tiger interchangeably, and so the sea lion became a tiger. The name sea lion is so...stupid. A sea lion looks nothing like a big cat. Who gave it that name? The first time Bentley saw that particular illustration of a sea lion, he thought it was a bird. It's in the "Panda Bear, Panda Bear What do I See?" book illustrated by Eric Carle. I have to agree with him. Carle's illustration looks like a large bird more than it looks like a sea lion--or sea tiger. I think I'll buy Bentley a book on identifying large cats. It's not easy sorting out the tigers, lions, leopards, cheetahs, and panthers.

I believe I have digressed significantly from puzzles. Oops! I'd start an entirely new post on animal identification, but my segue from puzzles to animals is so good, I'm leaving it in.

Here's a final photo of Puzzle Meister Bentley.