Make Your Own Puzzles

It's really easy to make your own puzzles using items you have around the house. You need styrofoam trays and an x-acto knife. If you aren't good with free form cutting then you want a stencil or cookie cutter to use for tracing your shape.

. Save the styrofoam trays that some meats, vegetables, and cheeses come on. Wash them very well, especially if yours held meat.

Using a sharp razor cut a single shape out of the center for your puzzle. For very young children cut a large shape out of the center (a square, triangle, or circle). For a slightly more complex puzzle, cut the shapes in half. Or draw and then cut out eyes, nose, and a mouth for a face. Or trace and cut out the basic outline of something like a car, a house, a horse, or a bird. Use a cookie cutter or a stencil and trace a large shape and then cut that out for a one piece puzzle- or cut out three or four shapes.

To make these puzzles even simpler for small fingers, put a brad through the center of each puzzle piece to make it easier for your child to pick up the piece.

You can also use magazine pages for temporary puzzles. Pull out pages with interesting pictures. Faces in particular are very fascinating to most young children. You can take two or three pages of faces, cut them in half, mix them up and have the child sort them and match the halves together. For younger children two pieces is good to start with. If you want these to last longer you can laminate them or past them to thicker pieces of cardboard.

When my daughters were younger I occasionally glued magazine pictures to a piece of cardboard that came in packages of nylon stockings and then cut that out into puzzles for them to put back together.