There are lots of printable jigsaws available on Activity Village, and in this guest post Shelly describes a couple of ways she has enjoyed using them with her children.
Three ways to use Activity Village jigsaws
By Shelly
We have used a few of Activity Village's jigsaws with my youngest so I thought it was time I wrote a post about what we do with them.
Ideas for Using Spelling Jigsaws
For each jigsaw that we print out we have found three standard ways of using them.
The first stage is where you only cut along the vertical lines (so the letters or numbers in the bottom strip are still attached to the picture). This is the easiest way. To begin with my son focused on creating the jigsaw by matching the picture pieces together. But after he did it a few times I noticed he started to pay more attention to the order of the letters.
Building the robin jigsaw puzzle
Once the kids get a bit more confident with the order of the letters, you can cut along the horizontal line. This means the letters are now separate from the picture, so there are no clues helping the kids figure out the order of the letters. For some reason even though the letters and the picture are no longer separate my youngest still insists on building both together - but the kids could just build the words without the picture if they wanted.
Winter robin word jigsaw, separated and put back together again
And if the kids are wanting something even more challenging you can cut the individual blocks again into smaller shapes!
Letter pieces cut smaller!
Here are the letter pieces!
With the word jigsaws we have also added another step. Once the kids are happy spelling out the word, we have made a game to see if they can use the letters from the jigsaw to create any other words. Perhaps they can reorganise the letters into a different order, or sometimes there are smaller words hidden within in the original word.
There are also back and white versions of the jigsaws which is great for saving a bit of ink and perfect for the kids to colour in themselves.
Colouring in one of the black and white jigsaws
Ideas for Using Number Jigsaws
For younger kids learning their numbers there are some basic counting (one to ten) jigsaws which work in exactly the same way as the word jigsaws; you can cut them out in vertical strips first and then later separate the numbers.
Black and white robin counting jigsaw
With the number jigsaws you could also encourage the kids to do simple number matching. They could match the some magnetic numbers to the number on the puzzle and they could do some one-to-one correspondence. Match the correct number of items to the correct number on the puzzle. So under number 1 they could place 1 pom-pom and under number 2 they would place 2 pom-poms etc.
Using the Ordinal Number Jigsaws
Ordinal Number Jigsaws are here
The last set of jigsaws that we have used are the ordinal number ones, for which there are also colour versions and black and white versions.
Black and white ordinal number frog jigsaw
They are a really easy way of making sure the kids get the order of the first ten ordinal numbers. We also extended it a bit and I wrote out the ordinal number words on a piece of paper and the kids had to match the strip with the correct ordinal number to its ordinal number word.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on their different learning activities including lots of hands-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
