Saturday, February 22, 2014

Kid Konnection: Duopress Puzzles


Every Saturday, I host a feature called Kid Konnection -- a regular weekend feature about anything related to children's books. This week, I'm going to share with you something a little different!

Through the years, I've reviewed quite a few Duopress board books, and I've always loved their adorable illustrations of popular locales. Now they are spreading out into another fun category -- puzzles. Duopress has a new line of children's puzzles featuring MY SAN FRANCISCO PUZZLE: THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE and MY NEW YORK PUZZLE: THE STATUE OF LIBERTY.

Summary: Kids will claim their love for America’s greatest cities with their first city puzzles. Depicting familiar scenes and landmarks in bold, bright colors, these puzzles are manufactured on high-quality paper using nontoxic soy-based ink and packed in a sturdy box, for easy storage. Perfect on the road or at home, these puzzles are lots of fun for young locals of or visitors to America’s greatest cities! -- Duopress

Summary: Kids will claim their love for America’s greatest cities with their first city puzzles. Depicting familiar scenes and landmarks in bold, bright colors, these puzzles are manufactured on high-quality paper using nontoxic soy-based ink and packed in a sturdy box, for easy storage. Perfect on the road or at home, these puzzles are lots of fun for young locals of or visitors to America’s greatest cities! -- Duopress

Both the San Francisco and New York puzzles are absolutely adorable and perfect for little ones. The puzzle pieces are geared towards children ages three and up and are very sturdy. Each puzzle has twenty pieces, and the finished size of the puzzle is 12.5 x 9 inches. Plus, they boxes are very solid and actually slide apart to hold the pieces. No crushed or torn boxes here!

I love this concept of designing puzzles which feature popular landmarks in different cities. What makes these puzzles even more fun, though, are the illustrations by Violet Lemay. Her use of colors is wonderful (just check out the fireworks on the New York puzzle), and I like that she added lots of interesting little items in the backgrounds.

My kids were right around three years old when they loved doing puzzles! They couldn't get enough of them and didn't mind doing the same ones over and over again. I can promise that these two puzzles would have been fast favorites for both of them!

As a mom, I like that these puzzles are not only fun but also educational. Granted, by themselves, they are cute pictures of famous landmarks; however, I think parents can take the opportunity to share with children the history of these images as well as the cities featured.

Highly recommended!

Thanks to the publisher for providing samples of these puzzles.

If you'd like to participate in Kid Konnection and share a post about anything related to children's books (picture, middle grade, or young adult) from the past week, please leave a comment as well as a link below with your name/blog name and the title of the book! Feel free to grab the little button too!

4 comments:

Vicki said...

These puzzles would be perfect for my youngest grandson!

bermudaonion said...

I love puzzles and had plenty of them around when Vance was small. Those are gorgeous!

Laura at Library of Clean Reads said...

We love doing puzzles in our family. They help develop so many skills.

Beth F said...

I love puzzles too! These looks great.