Jigsaw strategies March 22, 2006
In just the last week, Ella has become really interested in jigsaw puzzles. We’ve got some 4×3 piece puzzles that fit in a frame that someone gave us and they’re perfect for her. This past weekend we were working them with her and showing her different strategies. She was kind of getting it but each piece was like starting all over again.
Mary said she did them by herself all day yesterday and I had her work one for me this morning. She sped through and was using all these different strategies going back and forth between them and can do the whole thing by herself. It’s amazing how fast she picked all that up – I can just imagine what must be happening in her brain right now.
Since she was verbalizing it all too it’s very clear when she changes strategies (although some are starting to become automatic already). Here’s a few I picked out (some we showed and some I think she picked up on her own):
Piece-centric:
- Orient the content of the piece right-side up – she was having a hard time with this a few days ago but now is doing it automatically without even noticing it
- Corner piece goes to corner of puzzle – in combination with orientation on these simple puzzles, this tells you exactly where to put it
- Flat piece goes to an edge of puzzle – ditto mostly
Puzzle-centric:
- Find piece that matches the colors of an existing piece (a stripey bump to fit the hole in a stripey part)
- Given a piece, move it around to look for a match
What struck me is that these are the basic strategies you use for a jigsaw of any size – puzzles just scale up in size mostly. And of course if you’re interested in the challenge of it, there are more intentionally challenging puzzles they just remove the constraints that make these strategies work by using a non-rectangular perimeter, a surface that removes contextual clues, regularized piece shape, etc.
There are a few other strategies I can think of that she hasn’t had to deal with yet like looking for matches between bump and hole (in her case, they’re all the same).
Tags: jigsaw puzzles
