<strong>How Puzzles and Manipulatives Promote Development</strong>

The Toys and Games Area includes manipulatives, puzzles, collectibles, matching games, and other games that children can play at a table, on the floor, or on top of a divider shelf. These materials offer children a quiet activity that they can do alone, with a friend, with a teacher or a parent volunteer, or with a small group. Children strengthen all areas of their development as they play with toys and games.

<strong>Social/emotional development. </strong>

Children learn to cooperate with one another by sharing and taking turns as they play a game or build an intricate design. They develop confidence when they complete a task successfully using self-correcting toys such as puzzles, sorting boards, and stacking rings.

<strong>Physical development. </strong>

Children practice eye-hand coordination while lacing cards or placing pegs in a pegboard. When children string beads or construct with interlocking cubes, they refine small muscle skills.

<strong>Cognitive development. </strong>

As children build with table blocks or make designs with pattern blocks and parquetry blocks, they experiment with construction and invention and use creative problem-solving skills. They also expand their emerging math skills such as counting, seriation, matching, patterning, and classification. In fact, the Toys and Games Area often serves as the math hub in your classroom.

<strong>Language development. </strong>

Children use words to describe how they are putting together a puzzle or sorting a collection of objects. They compare the size, shape, and color of objects as they play. While using beads, pegboards, puzzles, dominoes, and collectibles, they develop reading skills such as left-to-right progression, visual discrimination, and matching similar objects. As they use magnetic letters and alphabet blocks, children explore letters, then arrange and rearrange them to form words.