96-Piece Children’s Globe
For children in the early grades, consider the 96-piece Puzzleball Globe. Large pieces and child-friendly graphics make this a perfect puzzle for a six-year old.

Bright, colorful, and adorned with animals, your young students will get a kick out of assembling and reassembling this puzzle.

Why Give Your Child A Puzzle To Teach Geography?
Puzzles can be educational in so many ways because they stretch your child’s brain and improve the way his mind solves problems. While he’s solving a puzzle, he’s really teaching his brain to work in new ways. As your child solves a geography puzzle he is mentally drilling himself with physical facts, such as what country goes next to the one he has just completed. Unconsciously he is making a number of associations as he searches for the next piece.

More Realistic Than A Flat Puzzle
Flat puzzles of spherical items are easier to assemble, but what if you could hone your geographical skills on something more appropriate, more true to life? Now you can with Puzzleball Globes. These sturdy plastic 3-D puzzles come in different levels suitable to be used with beginners or for a refresher for both your pre-teens and older children.

No Glue Required!
Each Puzzleball Globe comes with beautiful, vibrantly-colored, and perfectly-crafted curved puzzle pieces that allow for an exact fit and are easily assembled with no glue required!! A stand is included to display your work of art, but you will have so much fun putting it together that you shouldn’t be surprised if the stand gets little use!

Price: $12.75

Put out by: Timberdoodle (Publisher: Ravensburger)

For about the last week, my husband and I have been battling what appears to be the lovely H1N1 flu.  So the timing was great for this puzzle to arrive in the mail from Timberdoodle to help keep Ariel occupied – at least in theory.  The puzzleball globe has plastic pieces that go together to form an actual sphere.  This is great for geography, as it’s more accurate than flat maps!  The plastic pieces are very sturdy, and much easier to attach to each other than cardboard pieces typically are.  The two-year-old hasn’t knocked the puzzle apart yet.  (And if you know her track record, you know that’s saying a lot!)

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this puzzle.  It’s such an unusual concept that I couldn’t really imagine the implementation.  When the box arrived, I was relieved to see that the starting piece is packaged separately so you can find it, and you know where to begin.  There are guide pieces provided in the box so you know what the finished puzzle should look like, and the pieces are all numbered on the back for self-correction.  Even after all that, though, Ariel really struggled with this puzzle.  With her daddy’s help, she did ultimately get it together, but she required a good deal of assistance.  (Part of that, I think, is just her laziness about having to work at figuring it out.  She wanted to just know where the pieces go instead of having to work through it which, of course, is part of putting a puzzle together.)

We have no complaints about this puzzle.  It’s a great concept, it’s very well-made, and, by using the provided stand, we can even keep it together if we choose to and use it for our geography studies.  Assuming we can manage to avoid losing any pieces, I expect this to last for Sophia and perhaps even future children.

The product for this review was provided by Timberdoodle and MamaBzz.