Puzzle books fall into many different categories. Some are stories featuring puzzles, others are collections of puzzles waiting to be solved, and I suppose some might be a singular tome that cannot be opened or deciphered until a series of riddles is completed. (Actually, I’d like that book, please.) As a kid, I adored word searches and the rebus puzzles that were copied on the ditto machine as a special treat in elementary school (yes, I was born in the 1900s), but it wasn’t until the last decade or so that I realized completing a jigsaw puzzle could actually be fun. Now, I find myself subscribing to get access to Connections and The Mini, so I guess you could say the puzzle bug has stuck with me.
As an educator, over the past 20 years, I have noticed a lot ofchanges in the way people’s brains work. One thing that hasn’t disappeared, however, is our shared love for puzzles. In my school library, leaving out a jigsaw puzzle for staff to drift by is a massive community builder. During free choice times, kids constantly beg me to print out word searches. Even our illustration analysis during the Caldecott unit is a form of code-cracking: what do the...
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