We are a great fan of Orchard toys and puzzles in our house the Who's in the jungle puzzle is one we have had for a while and remains a firm favourite with my son despite him being very able to complete this now in generally under 5 minutes.


The puzzle is a large chunky puzzle that is ideal for my son' small hands to hold and manipulate into place. The puzzle is 42cm by 30cm so it about the size of an A4 piece of paper so doesn't take too much space up on the floor or table depending on where you are building your puzzle. There are 25 pieces in the jigsaw and mean that especially at the beginning it is a challenge for most 2-3 year olds. What I like about the individually pieces are that you can clearly identify part of an animal on each meaning it is useful to prompt my son to say find the rest of the a crocodile which allows him to complete the jigsaw much easily. Initially it would take a good 15 minutes to build the jigsaw together with a lot of prompts about things however now that he is nearly 4 he can do this with minimal help in under 5 minutes and no longer needs any prompts. The fact that there are bits of animal across several pieces means you can have discussions about the animals as you go or when the picture is complete. These chats in our house range from what colour is the tiger or how many butterflies are they. All this means there is great education value to the puzzle as well as the fun of completing it and the development of good hand eye co-ordination puzzles require of children. However as they have both tigers and lions together an incident that doesn't really happen in the wild the education can only go so far in identifying and talking about where the animals live. The box the puzzle comes in contains some handy hints to make the puzzle much more educational such as discussion topics around the animals such as how would they walk what noise would they make what would they eat, all of which we have used with a lot of success with our son. He is very animal mad so loves the opportunity to talk about the animals and learn about them more when we do the puzzle.


The pieces as with all Orchard Toy cardboard bits are made from recycled materials and can be wiped clean. We have found the pieces to be well made and even after a year of use they show no sign of damage or coming apart in anyway and this is even after in the beginning my son trying to ram bits that didn't match together. The wipe clean aspect works very well and I can definitely say that even with a damp cloth or wipe I have been able to remove sticky finger marks and bits of jam and biscuit from the pieces without any damage to it.


Overall this is a great puzzle for young children I think the age range of 3 years plus is in our experience a bit conservative as our son was able to do this from about 2 and half with some prompts so I personally would say the age range should be 2-4 rather than 3 plus. The brightly coloured animals make it a fun jigsaw picture to complete and it also provides a great source of conversation and discussion about animals with young children. At around £7 for the puzzle I think it is worth the price as it is so well made and I see no reason why this will not be used by our next addition in time.