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We love puzzles in this house! We have more puzzles than we would like to admit! This is partly because we buy them second-hand and it’s so hard to turn down cheap puzzles when we see them. We love the challenge and fun puzzles bring to our daughter.
However, we realize not everyone can or wants to have a bunch of puzzles. So we wanted to share which puzzles are our favorites.
By having such a collection of puzzles, we have been able to see which ones are the tried a true favorites and which ones get less love. Our daughter definitely has her favorite puzzles, while many have been short lived. If you’re looking for a place to start, we definitely recommend starting with these. There’s a good chance they will become a favorite in your house too.
You’ll notice that all of our top favorites are Melissa & Doug brand. In fact, the majority of our puzzle collection is made up of Melissa & Doug puzzles. There is no denying that Melissa & Doug are killing the puzzle game! As previously mentioned, we did not buy the majority of our puzzles brand new, so can also attest to the quality and longevity of Melissa & Doug puzzles.
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Here’s our top 3 favorite or most recommended puzzles for toddlers:
This “First Shapes Jumbo Knob” puzzle is a must-have! This is a great “first” puzzle to introduce to your little one. The big knobs make the pieces easy to grasp for young toddlers. We also like that there is matching pictures underneath each puzzle piece.
This puzzle was one of the first ones our daughter was introduced to and has grown well with her. The oval piece was the most difficult for her to master. We also used this puzzle to help teach colors and parts of the house. Now that our daughter is two and a half, we’ve brought the puzzle back into our rotation and have been using it to help teach shapes.
There are currently three puzzles in this series to choose from: Pets, Farm and Safari.
We have the “Safari” puzzle (we also have the “Farm” one stashed away for a Christmas gift!). If we had to pick our daughter’s absolute favorite puzzle, this would be it! She loves matching up the animals and playing with the animals independently. If you’re looking for inexpensive wooden animals, look no farther. The pieces are thick enough that they can stand up on their own. These can be a great alternative to the more expensive Ostheimer or Holztiger wooden animals. Our daughter actually seems to prefer these Melissa & Doug ones!
The animals are perfectly sized for little hands. We also use these puzzles to talk about animal names, animal sounds and colors. Even though our daughter has “mastered” this puzzle, she still enjoys putting it together and taking it apart. She also likes to “teach” us how to do it when we pretend to not be able to figure out where the pieces go. 100% recommend any of these Melissa and Doug chunky animal puzzles!
This chunky ABC puzzle is another one of our daughter’s favorites. It’s a bit expensive for a puzzle, but we lucked out and got it second hand. This puzzle has helped tremendously with letter recognition so we would even recommend paying full price for this puzzle if that’s something your child is struggling with.
We like that the puzzle board shows images of two things – an animal/person and an object starting with each letter. We definitely noticed our daughter linking the images with letter. She will say “‘O’ Octopus”, which is the animal on the puzzle for ‘O’ – even when she spots letters out in public and nowhere near the puzzle.
Similar to the chunky animals, mentioned above, the letters can also stand on their own (with the exception of a few like J and P, which have to lay on their sides). Our daughter likes to line them up and play with them independently.
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