Improve Your Kids Motor Skills! 10 Best And Inexpensive Wooden Puzzles For Kids
Inside- List of 10 wooden puzzles for kids under 5, you can buy from Amazon for under $20. Also 5 benefits of wooden puzzles for kids under 5 yrs of age, and their incredible benefits for your child’s growth and development!
Wooden puzzles for 2 year olds are the best investment a parent can make. The benefits of these puzzles go long from improving motor skills to increasing focus and concentration. They not only engage the kids right away but also engage them for a long time which gives parents time to focus on their work, or simply give you a much-needed break!
One of the best things about these puzzles is kids/children of any age can use this. They are available in different structures based on the age group of the child. The splash of colors and exciting designs in the puzzle pieces turn this an irresistible option for kids.
Why Are Wooden Puzzles Essential For A Child’s Brain Development?
Improves their skills
Do you think you can sit down and solve a rubik’s cube at one go? Half the way, we will lose our patience and move to something else. But children are capable of doing solving difficult challenges like rubik’s cube, only if we give them a chance.
Puzzles can engage them for a long time while they learn important motor skills and life skills. Some of them are improved concentration, finger coordination, logical thinking, patience, enhanced creativity, etc.
So this is not just fun but helps our children learn something interesting too. There is just something exciting about puzzles from an early age.
Minimal Supervision Needed
Wooden puzzles are usually made of safe and natural materials that wouldn’t harm the child in any way. If you buy age-appropriate wooden toys, you can let them play with them on their own without fear.
Buying puzzles that is suitable for their age is important here as some puzzles might have small parts. And these are not suitable for children below the age of 3 due to the potential choking hazard.
Make sure you get them puzzles that’re right for their age and let them enjoy their time with those puzzles.
Spatial Ability
This is a skill or capability to know and understand their surroundings better and how objects work. While doing puzzles, they keep on moving the pieces until it fits perfectly. This is a huge deal for them and pushes them an inch forward to develop this intellectual ability.
Early Learning
Wooden puzzles come mostly in different shapes that represent characters like animals, alphabets etc. With the help of this, you can teach them those along with colors and shapes too.
Toddlers can easily pick up one word instructions and when you do this by pointing to it, they remember it easily. Before even getting into the formal school environment, they can learn colors, numbers, animals, birds etc.
A Better Alternative For Screen Time
Screen time is the concern that many parents worry about a lot. Though we don’t want to do it, we are forced to do this to keep our children engaged for sometime. But puzzles are great alternatives for this that can divert them from gadgets and slowly make them stay away from it for good.
My Own Experience With Puzzles
For my elder child, I introduced single piece colorful wooden puzzles that came in round shapes when he was 9 months old. Curious about the shapes and colors, he kept experimenting the pieces and played with them separately for some weeks.
Then once I showed him how to match the pieces in the main tray, he tried following the same. He liked holding them with the help of the knobs and tried to match them one after another. Slowly, I introduced numbers and alphabet puzzles which helped a lot in our early learning phases.
Now he works on complex puzzles that have smaller and larger numbers of pieces and geometric puzzles like tangrams. He likes to be challenged and gets into his own world when he sits down with puzzle sets.
Now let me show the wooden puzzle collections available on Amazon that are mothers and Montessori instructors approved. There is one for all children from all age groups.
10 Affordable Wooden Puzzles on Amazon
MAGIFIRE Wooden Toddler Puzzles
You would never want to miss this basic style 4 to 6 pieces style wooden wooden puzzle set. This set has 6 different puzzles that come in shapes like bug, bear, butterfly etc.
The pieces are relatively thick, so they won’t fumble to pick them up. And due to this nature, it can withstand their rough handling and still stay strong.
None of the pieces have sharp edges that can harm the child while playing.
The splash of colors is an added advantage as children get easily attached to anything that’s colorful.
Play tip: Introduce the puzzles one by one and let them learn and master them individually. Then mix and match the pieces and let them identify which piece goes where.
CozyBomB Wooden Number Puzzle Sorting Wooden Toys for Toddlers
Looking for something interesting for your active toddler who won’t stay in a place? You can totally get them this!
In a single kit, they can learn to match both numbers and shapes and add rings in the wooden pegs. How cool is that! This is the classical toy that Montessori classrooms implement in their first few months of course.
And the good thing is both the material and dyes used for the toy is organic and child safe. You can pick any one from the three colorful patterns they have. This one below is the rainbow design.
Play tip: Teach them shapes first as they are bigger in size. And then move to numbers. While learning to match a particular number, you can teach counting the same too with the help of rings.
LIKEE Wooden Pattern Blocks Animals Jigsaw Puzzle
Get your toddler’s creativity and imagination to peak with this amazing puzzle set that offers multiple ways to engage with.
In this set, we are given 60 cards with colorful designs on it and 36 wooden pieces in different shapes. We can play it in either way, recreate the design on the card with pieces or let them create their own creative design.
This is something new and intriguing as it handles the control to the kids and doesn’t limit their imagination. Also, you have multiple ways to play with as there are many designs and shapes in here.
Even though this is little advanced, you can introduce this at the age of 2 and help them to learn how to recreate something.
Play tip: For young toddlers, use just the shapes. Hand them a few pieces and ask them to create things like moon, star etc. Or tell the color, size and shape and ask them to pick that from the box.
Melissa & Doug Farm Chunky Puzzle
When I became a mother, every mommy friend of mine recommended some kind of Melissa & Doug toys. After seeing their unbeatable quality, I understood why.
This pretty farm animal puzzle comes in an eye-catching wooden palette and has 8 attachable pieces in it.
They are pretty large to handle and sturdy as well. Toddlers usually get a lot excited about farms and animals. This can be a great addition to their stash.
Encourage your child to use the name of the animals while picking them and let them find its home.
Play tip: Teach them the name of the animal and its sound while helping them match it. Go one after another. Also, you can use these pieces for pretend play sessions.
Wooden Peg Puzzles for Toddlers by woodcity
And here comes the most loved wooden puzzles by all parents! Single piece puzzle sets with knobs are love because they are so easy to handle and the child picks it up quickly.
Here there are four different sets which feature animals, numbers, alphabets, shapes and transport. They can play this non-stop as there is a lot to do here. And the designs appear realistic too.
Once they grow up a bit, they can learn simple mathematical operations like addition, subtraction too. Apart from animals, every other set has background pictures that they can refer to while matching.
Play tip: Let them play with this one by one category and once they learn the characters, mix and match. You can also use the alphabets to form small words. While teaching transports, make it move and mimic their sound as well.
Wooden Toddler Puzzles by Quokka – Babies
This is also something similar to what we have seen earlier yet this doesn’t have the knob to handle it. Instead this has a gap in which they can let their little fingers to take it out.
They will be in awe looking at the cute animal designs printed on the wooden pieces. There are also shapes, numbers, and math symbols in other boards.
No rough edges that can irritate their hands while playing and the board and materials are natural too. Another noticeable advantage is the size of the puzzle pieces. They are big enough to be seen clearly and effortless to operate. Overall this assures you countless hours of fun with your little one!
Play tip: Help them learn animal sounds and names with this. Sing some rhymes and let them associate it to matching the pieces. Help them count the pictures in the number board.
SKYFIELD Wooden Shape Puzzles
If you don’t want to buy puzzle sets in bulk and just looking for single sets focussing on one group, then check out this. This wooden shape puzzle is the most affordable and good quality set that you cannot miss!
The shape pieces are very thick to an extent that a child can easily take it out of its spot. And I loved the colors they have used here to make them appear distinct.
Don’t worry about swallowing as the pieces are made large enough to not enter their mouth. Let them learn shapes and colors while developing their fine motor skills, focus and coordination.
Play tip: What’s fun without colors and shapes? Say a color’s name and let them pick it out and find the spot for it. Let them learn unusual shapes like drop, flower, heart which they might not get to see in other sets.
Elite wooden Thick Single/Multiple Shape Puzzles
There comes the very basic puzzle set we have to get for our child after their first birthday. This is really special for many parents as this has helped their little toddler learn to put puzzle pieces in place for the first time.
This has four large pieces with four shapes and the knob is large enough for the little fingers to grab around. Initially they will take some time to explore, hold and lick the object. It takes some time to perfectly match the right shape puzzle.
To suit the age group, all pieces of this set are made thick and sturdy. Small and thin pieces can sometimes spoil fun for them as it’s tough to handle. This is a perfect option for them to use during their early toddlerhood.
Play tip: This is what worked for me to finally get my son to match the puzzle. Take the piece and make clickety sounds while matching it. They observe where the sound comes from and try to mimic that.
UMTOY Wooden Puzzle Jigsaw Toy
Another lovely set of puzzles for toddlers of 2 to 4 years old. This wooden puzzle set has big obvious pieces that are easy to identify for children at the same time challenging enough.
You get 8 puzzle pieces in them and each one of them belongs to a different category. There is fish, rocket, elephant, train and other objects your kids would love to see.
This ticks all the checks of a basic wooden puzzle that you can introduce to your child when they enter toddlerhood.
Pieces are big and thick enough so that they can grab and work with it without much struggle.
Play tip: Every puzzle board has images related to the puzzle like plants, sun, water etc. While they fix this, help them relate the puzzle to those objects.
LiKee Animals Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles
This is something different than puzzles we have seen before. This popsicle stick puzzle set is suitable for children of 3+ years old and engages them for a solid one hour.
Popsicle sticks are painted and when joined together they form cute animals like mouse, pandas. They are going to love this as it is easy to move and has a single pattern throughout.
Let them join with their friends and enjoy their play sessions together with this innovative puzzle set.
Play tip: Each puzzle set has a different background color. Combine all sticks together and let them identify which color goes where.
To conclude,
Puzzles are absolutely essential to have in the activity set collections of your children. It is available for all age groups and the benefits it comes along with are a lot to mention.
And children never really get bored of these. So this is not the kind of toy they will play for some days and lose interest after some days.
The more they play with this, the more hooking it is. Gift them the pleasure of doing puzzles by getting one of the above recommended sets. Looking for best board books collections for toddlers? Do check this blog.
