What are DIY Puzzles?
Puzzles are a wonderful game that helps in developing motor skills, especially fine motor, and memory skills, as well as upgrading a person’s ability to think and solve various problems with ease. Children from every sphere are seen enjoying and loving to solve puzzles. It’s a great way of passing the time, and at the same time provides immense knowledge.
DIY Puzzles, as the name suggests, are the ones which are prepared at home with different household stuff. You can keep your children, of any age, engaged in their leisure time by creating these puzzles for kids. This will in turn help them in their brain development and improve their visual perception. In this article, you will get to read about some great ideas to create DIY puzzles.
Ideas to Create DIY Puzzles
Puzzles have always proved to be a fun, interesting and knowledgeable source of brain growth in children. The fun doubles up if you can make your own puzzle at home. So, you get all the independence of customizing the puzzle depending on your child’s needs.
DIY Puzzle ideas should be unique and can be built with anything you have at your disposal, such as unused cloth pieces, wood pieces, cardboard, coloured papers, ice cream sticks, newspaper, etc. You may also create picture puzzles for kids using family pictures. Below is a detailed list of puzzle ideas for all the do-it-yourselfers:
Wood Pieces Puzzle
Identifying various shapes and colours is a very important part of every child’s life. So, if you can make a puzzle that could help them easily learn and identify these, it would be very useful for kids. Let’s see how to create this one.
Wood Pieces Puzzle
Requirements: Wood pieces, acrylic colours.
Steps to Create:
Grab some solid wood pieces which are no longer of any use.
Draw portions of different geometrical shapes like squares, circles, rectangles, triangles, stars, etc., on each of those.
Use different shades to colour them. Make sure to use a single shade for one shape.
Now, unscramble all the wood pieces and let your child arrange them in groups either shape-wise or colour-wise. This will definitely help them in knowing different shapes and colours easily.
Cardboard Puzzle
We often have some unused pieces of cardboard left from some previous craft materials. These cardboards could be very useful in making puzzles for kids that would be fun and challenging to play.
Requirements: Cardboard sheets, a pair of scissors, a set of crayons
Steps to Create:
Take a cardboard sheet and draw different items, like shapes, animal figures, trees, fruits, etc. on it using a pencil. Draw very thin lines so that the cardboard is not left with any impressions.
Next, take a pair of scissors and cut through the outline of each drawn item very carefully.
To make the activity more interactive and colourful, use some crayons to fill up the cut-out pieces.
Keep the puzzle pieces ready in a bowl. Ask your child to pick one and place each item on the cut-out portion of the cardboard by matching the respective shapes.
This would help them enhance their visual perception.
Popsicle Stick Puzzle
Ice lollies or popsicles are one of the favourite summertime desserts for every child and they also love collecting the sticks after having one. Hence most of us will have some of those pop sticks back at home. You can easily make a puzzle by using these sticks. This can be a fun and challenging puzzle for your kids.
Ice Lolly Stick Puzzle for Kids
Requirements: Ice lolly sticks, water colours, marker pens.
Steps to Create:
Collect all the lolly sticks you’ve got at home.
Use water colours of different shades to colour them. Remember to colour each pair of sticks using the same shade.
Next, using the permanent marker write different words on the sticks. The format to be followed is that each pair of same-coloured sticks will have a single word written on them, with the upper half portion of the letters on one stick and the lower half portions on the other.
Once done, mix up all the sticks and place them on a table or the floor. Let your kid find out each word from the heap of sticks.
This would help your child develop his/her ability to think tactically and make more words.
Paper Puzzle
Paper is a very easily available source for DIY puzzles. It can be used in various ways to create a paper puzzle and make a challenging and fun activity for your child.
Requirements: Blank paper, pencil, crayons, double-sided foam tape, cardboard, pair of scissors.
Steps to Create:
Take a blank piece of paper.
Draw a picture on it and then colour it using crayons. Don’t show the picture to your kid.
Take a piece of cardboard and cut it into the same size as the paper.
Next, cut the paper into small squares of nine equal pieces and paste the double-sided foam tape on the back of each.
Paste any one of the pieces on the cardboard sheet.
Now, let your child paste the rest of the pieces on the cardboard in the same way as above and see if he/she could complete the puzzle by arranging all the pieces in the right place.
This simple puzzle could help your child in increasing his/her thinking skills.
Jigsaw Puzzle
This is one of the very renowned and commonly played puzzles all over the globe. Kids and even teens love playing with this type of puzzle. Although it’s easily available everywhere, creating it as a DIY puzzle for kids at home is more fun.
Requirements: Cardboard, paper, pen, crayons, glue, a pair of scissors.
Steps to Create:
Take a blank piece of paper and cardboard.
Paste the paper on the cardboard using some glue. Let it dry.
Draw something nice on the paper and colour it using crayons. Don’t show the picture to your child.
Cut the cardboard along with the paper pasted on it into nine or twelve pieces in the form of a jigsaw.
Collect all the jigsaw puzzle pieces in a bowl or tray and ask your child to assemble the picture using those puzzle pieces.
Instead of drawing something on your own, you may also paste a family picture on the cardboard and that would be some picture puzzles for kids.
Benefits of DIY Puzzles
Puzzle activities can help your child in many ways. These are as follows:
Improve the development of fine motor skills.
Increase visual perception.
Boost understanding and thinking capability.
Increase brain growth.
Help in improving the coordination between hands and eyes.
Conclusion
DIY puzzles are the ways of building puzzles at home. These fun puzzles for kids can not only entertain them and keep them engaged, but also help them in the growth of their brains. These types of puzzles can be made using any kind of unused household materials and the procedure to create these can itself be very interesting.
