Puzzling it Out

Jonah's interest in his trains and cars has waned a bit recently, as he has taken a budding interest in doing puzzles. He got a great set of four small transportation-themed puzzles for his birthday. Each puzzle has 12 pieces, which was just about the right number for his patience until he began focusing on them more intensely.

Ben and I explained to him a number of concepts that adults might use in solving puzzles: things like "outside" pieces, how to look for pieces of the puzzle that relate to one another pictorially (pieces that have sky in them, for example), and to understand what we call "knobbies" and "holes" and how pieces fit together (you can't connect a hole to a hole). For the most part, Jonah's initially success with the puzzles was entirely a matter of trial and error (and a lot of asking for help, which we tended to provide only minimally, mixed with the occasional outbreak in frustration). He's become much more proficient of late and managed to get a 24-piece puzzle together with minimal help on his own last night. Here he is doing one of the 12-piece puzzles late last month:

Lately, I've caught him using some self-talk that indicates he is beginning to get some of the concepts that we've been talking about. One night last week, I heard him tell himself that he needed to find another tree piece and also that he was matching the pieces that both contained the train conductor's hair. It is so cool to see how his thinking and skills are developing!