My eldest daughter saw this puzzle in the Early Leanring Centre a few months ago and wanted to buy it for her sister for her 2nd birthday, the puzzle was £10 at the time although checking it on the Early Learning website this morning it is currently in a 20% off promotion so is selling at £8.

The product is one of Early Learning centres own so unless you pick it up on one of the second hand sites you can only buy it from them but you can buy it both online and in the store.

The jigsaw puzzle is made of wooden pieces and I must admit I am a fan of wooden puzzle for young children as I find that they are harder for them to damage and of course once a piece of a puzzle is damaged the whole puzzle is useless. This puzzle has 27 pieces to it and the pieces are about a cm thick if not even a little bit more so that are really strong.

The pieces of the puzzle are the snakes head and then all 26 letters on one side and on the other side you have the snakes head agin with the numbers 1-20 and some mathematics signs, plus, mius, divide, times and equals. The puzzle is recommended for ages 3 and up but we allowed Sophie to buy her sister it as she has a lot of wooden puzzles which she was finding too easy so we thought this one would be a challenge.

When Emily frst got the puzzle she kept trying to put the wrong pieces together as she would at 2 years old as she doesn't know her alphabet so we decided to help her by giving her the correct pieces first to encouareg her to put them together. With us helping Emily she was easily able to put the Adder together and when complete she says "snake sssss" Once we got to the stage that she can put the Adder together we have started her on the numbers 1-10, we give her the Adders face and turn the pieces so that we have the numbers showing rather than the letters and we are gradually working on number recognition with her as she is able to count from 1-13 with ease now.

The colours on this puzzle are a little bit dull which I found quite strange for a childrens puzzle, the pieces are really robust and the pieces that fit together fit perfectly so you can tell it is really well made. Emily enjoys playing with the puzzle and it is something that her older sister can help her with as she knows all her numbers. I love that we can use this puzzle in stages and she has got to grips with some of her numbers so once we can do 1-10 we will in introduce some more numbers before we move onto the letters.

This is a rreally great set and I don't think it is unreasonable for a 2 year old to be playing with it aslong as they don't put the pieces in their mouths which Emily doesn't, the puzzle is great value and provides educational value too as well as being lots of fun of course.