Best Floor Puzzles for Kids

Putting puzzles together is a wonderful activity helping children work on their concentration, fine motor and problem solving skills.

Babies as young as six months old can start playing with beginners' puzzles introducing them to various shapes and colors.

For beginners choose puzzles that are not only age appropriate, but also quick and easy, and once you child feels confident, you can move to more challenging ones. Here is an assortment of interactive puzzles for kids of all ages, even those entering their second childhoods.

The little ones like vibrant colors, fun animals and underwater creatures.

Stay away from puzzles with letters and numbers with this young age group. Some of the puzzles have little knobs attached to the pieces which makes it easier for the little ones to grasp and move around.

You can imitate the sounds the animal makes as they put the puzzle together. Some puzzles are battery operated and make sounds when put together.

Children develop at different levels, so a puzzle that maybe easy for one, can overwhelm another.

My son was 3 years old when he started being interested in putting very simple puzzles together, by age 4 he was already putting a 100 piece puzzle together.

My 2 1/2 year old daughter is already trying to figure out a 36 piece floor puzzles. Introduce one puzzle at a time, children in this age group might also want to put the same puzzle over and over again

This age group can be introduced to 36 or 48 or 100 pieces floor puzzles.

Sometimes several children can work together at one big floor puzzle, crawling around on the floor. Choose fun themes that the preschoolers might like - ocean, dinosaurs, planets, castles, ships and pirates or any favorite movie character like Thomas the train.

My children never particularly cared for letters or numbers puzzles, they just wanted to have fun putting something new together. However, once my son learned his ABC, he was very involved in the spelling puzzles which I brought in.

Letters, numbers and spelling puzzles can be a wonderful gift for your preschooler. Skills, mastered with the first puzzle - such as locating pieces with the proper coloring or finding and connecting all the edge pieces - will be transfered to the next puzzle, and, eventually generalized to all possible puzzles.