Puzzles

Does your family love doing puzzles together? These colorful, educational puzzles are a great way to bond together and learn about the US, the world, and our solar system!

The Kids' Puzzle of the United States: When you study the United States, this puzzle offers an excellent opportunity to learn the placement, shape, and relative size of the different states.

This big puzzle has 55 extra-thick pieces. The border interlocks, and then the pieces, shaped like states, nest into place. (From Virginia up through New England, three of the pieces have more than one state. The rest of the states are one state per piece.)

Includes the state capitals. Many pieces have pictures symbolic of their respective states (a peach in Georgia, skiing in Colorado, cowboy and armadillo in Texas).

Your family will enjoy learning United States geography as they put the pieces in place.

30" x 18". Advertised as for ages 4 and up. (But because the pieces don't interlock, most young children will appreciate help.)

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The Global Puzzle: Did you know the average individual knows where only 18 of the world's 193 countries are located?

The company A Broader View decided they wanted to do something to improve this statistic, so they created The Global Puzzle, a unique 600-piece puzzle that has proven to increase its users' geography knowledge by an average of 472% after completing the puzzle only one time.

One of Sarita Holzmann's daughters remembers the first time her family put the Global Puzzle together. Sarita, even after having founded Sonlight some years before, stared at the finished product and said, "Wow. I never realized how little of the land masses are below the equator."

Which goes to show both that Sonlighters keep learning for life, and that the Global Puzzle is an outstanding geography instructor.

How The Puzzle Works

The Global Puzzle is an outstanding geography aid because the pieces are actually shaped like the countries, which means you have to figure out where countries are located in order to complete the puzzle. (The oceans are traditional interlocking jigsaw puzzle pieces.)

And the United States and Canada have their states and provinces also cut out by shape.

(A few of the smaller countries and states share a puzzle piece and some large countries are spread over more than one piece. So if you sneeze, you won't lose Rhode Island.)

The Global Puzzle includes:

All 193 countries and their capitals
All 50 states of the U.S. and their capitals
All 13 territories and provinces of Canada and their capitals

In addition, the puzzle also includes dozens of geography facts about the countries printed within the oceans' borders.

This version of The Global Puzzle is geographically current as of 2010.

Three feet wide, 600 pieces. For ages 9 and up.

Challenging and fun.

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The Solar System and Beyond Puzzle: Learn more about the solar system while you put together this 3' long puzzle. 500 uniquely shaped pieces (not the standard "two tabs and two divots" pieces). The planets are on round pieces.

As the manufacturer says,

Explore the solar system with this unique puzzle while expanding your knowledge of planets and more. The pieces of this puzzle are actually shaped like the planets and other stellar bodies.

As you know, the solar system is a pretty large place, so this puzzle would be incredibly frustrating if the rest of the pieces were all blackness. We took on this challenge by including a clue on every single pieces as to its location; whether it be background galaxies, quasars, satellites, nebulas, comets, colored planet orbits, space stations or the beautiful background glow of the Milky Way. And many of these pieces are uniquely shaped like the stellar bodies that they represent.

For assistance, there is a larger poster of the completed image inside that has outlines of all of the uniquely shaped pieces. On the back of the puzzle, there is a planetary guide that tells you all about the sun, the planets and the other stellar bodies. All in all, this education puzzle ends up being very entertaining as well.

Ages 8 and up.

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Or get all three together in the Puzzle Bundle!