Stocking Stuffers

This educational puzzle increases your childs awareness of shape recognition and shape sorting. Board is printed with animal shapes to assist children in matching the animals. Puzzles are a great opportunity to grow your childs gross and fine motor skills, hand and eye coordination, problem solving, shape and colour recognition.

Enhance your play and learning with these simple ideas

• Discuss the animals , the sounds that they make and what they eat
• Talk about what environment each animal lives in
• Sort the animals into categories of skin, scales and feathers
• Stack the animal and make a tower
• Animals can be used in pretend play 

Suitable for ages 18m+

Product Dimesnions: 27cm L x 27cm W x 4cm H

A sophisticated educational puzzle which offers learning across all preschool milestones. At its simplest, it can be used for basic shape and colour recognition (including shading) and at its most complex for development of numeracy skills, in particular the understanding of the concept of parts of a whole or fractions.

Some examples of ways to encourage the development of logical thinking and foundation numeracy skills:

• Looking at and naming the shapes of all the pieces.
• Looking at and matching the pieces that are similar colours.  Why are these colours both the same but different?
• For older children, the concept of parts of a whole can be discussed.  The yellow circle is one whole but what is different about the other pieces?  For example, there are 4 pink squares but when put together they make a whole. This is an opportunity to talk about quarters.  Later, during the school years, this puzzle can be revisited to help with understanding of decimals, for example, 25% instead of a quarter.

Suitable for ages 18m+

Material: Wood

Product Dimensions: 21cm L x 19cm W x 2.5cm H

A puzzle designed to assist with the development of a number of essential cognitive skills.  It offers the opportunity to develop problem-solving skills, numerical understandings, logical thinking, shape and colour recognition and seriation (a fundamental sorting skill which relates to recognition of relative size and patterns). There is also an opportunity for the development of tower building the fine motor skill involving placing and balancing.

Ideas to enhance learning and play:

• Making a rainbow.  Once the colours are learnt then may follow the introduction of the concept of smallest to largest or largest down to smallest. Pick and place the smallest piece of the rainbow.  Which piece comes next? Or pick and place the largest piece of the rainbow etc.
• This seriation can also be repeated with the birds
• The pieces can also be used separately away for the puzzle base for building and balancing towers of rainbows or birds or birds on top of rainbows.

Suitable for ages 18m_

Material: Wood

Product Dimensions: 19.5cm L x 21.5cm W x 3.5cm H

An educational puzzle which captures the attention of those preschoolers who are strongly motivated to play with cars and trucks. It encourages the development of colour and number identification and also assists with hand-eye-coordination. Match the number dots to the numbers on the cars or match the car colours to the colour on the truck. 

A great puzzle for open-ended play. 

Promote and enhance learning by:

• Asking the child to identify the colours of the cars and to match them with the colours on the puzzle board
• Asking the child to name the numbers on the cars as they are being placed into the corresponding numbers on the board and then count from 1 to 10 aloud.
• Telling a story together about the truck stopping at various locations and dropping off specific cars (by either colour or number or both).  The child should remove those cars before the truck continues on the journey. The truck could also be picking up cars at various locations for example at this stop we are collecting car numbers 3 and 7.  

Suitable for ages 18m+

Material: Wood

Product Dimensions: 40.5cm L x 15.5cm W x 3.5cm H

This beautiful magnetic wooden educational puzzle is a great tool for learning basic mathematical concepts. This puzzle has enough numbers to count to 100. A tracing stick is provided to help build the fine motor skills, practice pen holding, and the correct way to write each letter. Puzzles are a great opportunity to grow your child's gross and fine motor skills, hand and eye coordination, problem-solving, shape and colour recognition.

Enhance your play and learning with these simple ideas:

• Learn the numbers and practice saying them.
• Sort the puzzle pieces by colour.
• Order the numbers in the correct order.
• Create maths equations using the puzzle pieces.
• Have your child spell the number.
• Trace and practice the movement of writing the numbers.

Suitable for ages 18m+

Product Dimensions: 29.5cm L x 29.5cm W x 1.5cm H