When do children really do jigsaws?

[AliceTheCamelHasFiveHumps]

My DD is just turned 2, and loves a jigsaw. She does 12 pieces.
But, I have observed her, and she seems to actually just be remembering where the pieces go...if that makes sense?
So she isn't trying to find the rest of the flowers, or a red piece that might fit. She scans the table and find the piece she knows goes there.
If it's her first time if the puzzle, she needs a bit more guidance, but can do the 12 pieces. But once she's done it a couple of times, she just remembers.

So, when do kids actually"get" puzzles?

For reference, this is her favourite puzzle atm

My kids loved them at 3 and 4 ish, the big floor ones with big pieces, still struggling to see the pattern as you say at 3 but still loving it. I think it's really good for perseverance and patience

It takes a long time for children to get this & needs to be explicitly taught. I teach y1 and even at 5 & 6 a lot of children won’t routinely look for patterns or eg think ‘that’s an edge piece, it can’t go in the middle’.

My dc are older now 9 & 7 and would do this now but I can’t remember when they learnt it.

They vary, OP. My first DD was doing 40 piece jigsaws at 2 years old, but she is autistic with an IQ over 160. My second DD, neurotypical, was quite a lot slower.
It’s best to just go with the flow, and provide jigsaws of gradually increasing size and difficulty as they complete each level.

DD is turning 3 in a month and she has just got to the stage of identifying corner pieces and straight sides. I've been trying to teach her to look at the picture as a guide so she tries to find all the bits that make up the shark on her ocean themed puzzle.

We're up to about 40 piece puzzles although her favourites ones are the big floor musical button ones as the pieces are nice and chunky.

Ds loved jigsaws when about 3/4

I think too he remembered where the pieces went

At that age he had an amazing ability to really concentrate at 4 he was doing Lego models for 12+ I thought he was a little genius 😊

Then suddenly that level of concentration disappeared and hasn’t really returned unless gaming

I tried to do a kids' jigsaw the other day with my 5 year old niece. I have not done a jigsaw since I was a child and I just really struggled. There were probably only 10 pieces but it took me ages. So maybe some people (i.e. me!) just never get the hang of it

Hi everyone, (first post here from a newbie)

I would say my oldest boy has only just managed to tackle hard ones on his own (he is 4 yrs old turning 5 in Jan). He really enjoys them and I feel they are great for the mind, we have gradually increased the difficulty over time. If we have ever gave him one which is too hard then we simply put it aside and move back down the chain to one slightly easier. It is so hard to guage which one to chose though as you will not know until the first week if he is enjoying it or too difficult.

It is a fine balance though when doing this though, if you do give them too many which are difficult you run the risk of them losing interest totally so I would play it safe most times.

Hope this helps

I can't remember but I do recall that when DS2 was about 2.5 he could do puzzles upside down. IE with the blank side uppermost. Most odd.

DD was 3 I think (possibly slightly younger). She definitely started by trying to match bits of the picture but it really helped that they were Peppa pig jigsaws she did first so she could easily identify e.g. all the pieces with a bit of Suzy Sheep on and put those together. Then she might have needed a bit of help to finish off the parts that didn't have characters on, eg "this part has a red balloon. Can you find another piece that has a bit of the red balloon on?"

My kids had a few jigsaws when they were small, did them when I would get them out and needed some prompting as to how to do them. Never particularly enjoyed them. Then we basically didn’t do any jigsaws until lockdown and the kids are now 11 and 9 and they just took to them immediately, found them fun and straightforward, and would fit the pieces like an adult, based on edges, pattern and shape. So clearly it isn’t something you have to build up to as they went from small kids puzzles (at ages 2/3 ish) to 500 piece ones with no intermediate steps at all.

My daughter is 2.5 OP and exactly like yours. She’s enjoyed puzzles since just before 2 and can now do 35 piece puzzles independently now - after she has done them once or twice before. The first couple of times she needs a bit of help. So I do think she’s just remembering where the pieces go.

It’s interesting, as an adult my default is to find all the edge pieces and build the edge first. My daughter looks for parts of the picture which are obvious and builds up that way. Which actually, is a much more sensible way of doing it!