My eldest daughter has always loved doing jigsaw puzzles, when she finished with the usual baby lift out puzzles we wanted something a little more like a real jigsaw for her and came across these puzzle from Early Learning Centre.

The puzzles cost about £5 at the time we bought them although they are now on sale at £6 so they have gone up a little in price. The puzzles comes in a pretty tough cardboard box, I say it is pretty tough as after lots of play and I do mean almost every day for a couple of months the box does have some damage but is still perfectly strong enough to hold onto the pieces, the box also has a carry handle which my daughter loved using to carry allsorts of things around.

Inside the box there are 12 pieces of jigsaw puzzle which make up 6 different jigsaw puzzles of two pieces each. The jigsaws are of farm animals and you get a sheep, goat, hen, duck, horse and cow. The jigsaw puzzles like most are made of many sheets of cardboard compacted together making them nice and strong, the pieces of these jigsaws are very durable and they still fit together perfectly even after so much playing with.

We bought these puzzles for my daughter when she was about 16 months old although the puzzles are supposed to be for children 18 months and up however I think this is probably more for the fact of a younger child may chew the pieces rather than capability as at 16 months old my daughter was more than ready for them.

My daughter took a little while to get to grips with these puzzles and we did find it much better to play with them on a hard surface such as a table as we struggled to get them to stay together when she played on the floor with them. The pictures on the jigsaws are bright and bold with little detailing on them which makes them suitable for younger children to concentrate on.

After a few goes with our support we found that our daughter could generally manage them on her own although she would mix up the pieces of similar colours but she was always very independent and would insist that we didn't help her. After a couple of months she was able to do each jigsaw perfectly every time so we ended up passing these jigsaws down to my cousin and they were still in pretty perfect condition even after the length of time she has been playing with them too.

I would recommend these jigsaws as would my daughter, she got many hours of play from these puzzles and they were of brilliant quality and a great price and of course there is the added bonus of using them to teach your child about animals.