thechristmasprojectdiary

The Twelve Days of Christmas Jigsaw Puzzle has been a source of quiet fun for several weeks now and yesterday it was finally completed.

All 1,000 jigsaw puzzle pieces were accounted for and my children and I were rather pleased to find that that was indeed the case.

This jigsaw puzzle, purchased several weeks ago from a local Charity Shop, was one that appealed because it was one with the subject being so very Christmasy.

My daughter particularly has spent numerous moments in time, over the last little while, sitting quietly searching for each and every piece needed to complete many a given section on the puzzle.

Occasionally my son and I looked on also and a piece or two stood out and was able to be put in place, however the greater measure of the puzzle was undertaken by my daughter and she personally oversaw to the greater portion of the puzzle coming to be correctly put in place…. this 1,000 piece puzzle was really quite challenging!

Because the puzzle was purchased secondhand, I have been quietly hoping it wouldn’t prove to be a source of disappointment by a piece or two being found to be missing.

Buying a secondhand jigsaw puzzle is a great way to have a go at doing such puzzles and not spending a fortune, but there is always that risk: will there sadly prove to be a piece or two missing??

Some Charity Shops are very good about getting volunteers to check a puzzle, by going about making it up & checking BEFORE placing them on the shop floor for sale.

However, in this instance there did not seem to be any proof that a thorough check in fact had taken place of this particular puzzle…. so I bought it, quietly hoping we would NOT go down the track of making it up, to find we had bought a bit of a dud.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a dud and all 1,000 pieces were indeed able to be accounted for. Whew…..and Yay!

The jigsaw puzzle is complete and it is finally finished. It was quite a feat doing this 1,000 piece puzzle and took considerable perseverance (particularly on my young daughter’s part), to work away on it.

The completed puzzle is currently sitting on its table and we are all enjoying having a day or two of being able to walk past it in order to see the accomplished end result.

After literally hours & hours of commitment and careful work, I think it is totally appropriate to honour the effort made to complete this quite challenging puzzle by letting it sit for a day or so.

It is quite nice to take time to now see all the different various scenes contained in the puzzle. Where is the partridge? Where are the leaping lords heading off to? Can you account for all the golden rings?

I will continue to keep an eye out in the future for other Christmas themed jigsaw puzzles. We have two other non-Christmas themed jigsaw puzzles which the children wish to work on soon, one of a vintage car and the other relates to one of the children’s schooling focuses this term on the land of Egypt, so puzzles will still be part and parcel of our family daily even if they are not necessarily Christmasy.

Doing jigsaw puzzles is beneficial in so many different ways and as a household we all quite enjoy doing them, both as a leisure time activity and also as an extra-curricular activity as part of our family’s home education programme.

Some of the most significant educational benefits of doing jigsaw puzzles is that the doing of them encourages the development of one’s ability to concentrate, as well as exercising patience and persistence through a longer drawn out task.

Doing jigsaw puzzles can also allegedly increase one’s visual-spatial and cognition reasoning, as well as one’s ability to problem solve. These are all incredibly beneficial to help with brain development, so having learnt about these additional benefits being connected to the doing of jigsaw puzzles, I am personally that bit more of a pro-jigsaw puzzle enthusiast than I was even previously.

If jigsaw puzzles can encourage a child to learn to be that bit more diligent and committed, as well as help to engage both the left and right hemisphere of the brain to work extra well together, that is an awesome additional underlying outcome on top of seeing a jigsaw puzzle simply come to completion finally.

This Twelve Days of Christmas jigsaw puzzle at times was very challenging because swan feathers and snowy landscapes can have shapes, forms and colours very similar, we all soon discovered!

However, this puzzle is now completed in entirety and the swans are where the swans should be and the snow is finally where the snow should be.

Working away at this particular puzzle has been a wonderful quiet indoor activity these summer days, while it has been rather too hot to want to do much else.

1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles really are not for the faint hearted or those with little patience. They are definitely that bit more complicated than a 500 piece puzzle we discovered. We are all glad to see this rather testing 1,000 puzzle finally accomplished…. and the next one (which also happens to be another 1,000 piece one) is about to be begun.