h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I like this entry.

You forgot to say, before you look for the edges, in my opinion, "Turn all of the pieces picture side uppermost". Obvious but important if you are instructing children. It also helps in the identification of edge pieces as more pieces go through your fingers. Again some are printed both sides with baked beans to really drive you nuts!

You're spot on about the sky not generally being the same tone and it's amazing how observant you can become of nuances in colour, which I think is very good practice for people.

I'd say in choosing a jigsaw for a child choose thicker fewer pieces to begin with and then work up to the 5,000 piece baked beans ones. I remember putting all of my jigsaws into one box when I was bored with them and having to sort out all sorts of pieces before I could complete them. Some were thicker wooden pieces while a few were cardboard but it kept me quiet for a while.

Ooh, blimey, yes, I did completely forget about making sure the pieces are all the right way up. Also forgot about jigsaws with the same (or different!) pictures on both sides.

Glad you liked the entry though!

Indeed - good entry

It's definitely very interesting to do jigsaws with young children because you come to realise how many 'skills' are involved in them.

As the initial poster says just remembering to turn all the pieces up the correct way is one step. Teaching them the difference between edges and middle pieces is another.

Also there are different ways of locating where a piece fits. Sometimes as an adult you see a particularly shaped hole and know that only a certain shaped piece will fit there. Other times it's a case of getting a piece of the picture. Often I've seen my daughter have the correct piece but discard it as not fitting because she doesn't try rotating it through all four permutations/directions that a piece can fit.

Additionally there is the skill of organising the groups of joind pieces in areas consistent with the picture. For example if you were doing a jigsaw of a map of the British Isles, you'd have the groupings for Scotland up the top of your table, Ireland over on the left, England on the right and below. Eventually adding the right pieces allows these to be joined up. Even though I encourage my daughter to use the picture on the box I will often see her doing the jigsaw with say, England above Scotland, and have to look on bemused as she fails to realise that by moving them to their logical places she could easily join the two areas.

I guess the basic rule of jigsaws is that you keep breaking it into a series of smaller jigsaws that lower the permutations. E.g. group into edges and corners; into objects, into edges of objects and body of objects; into sky and into dark blue sky, light blue sky etc, etc.