Information
Highlights puzzle and activity books are published by Penguin in India
4 volumes
You can buy them here
Marked for 3 to 6 year old kids
Price: Rs 199 for each volume
What Do The Books Contain?
Each book has 4 types of activities listed under 4 sections as you can see below.
The matching section is the simplest. Most of the matching puzzles are like the picture below where objects from the left page have to be matched to their twin on the right.
In a few cases they have matching of baby animals to their mothers and such.
The poem puzzles include a variety of activities including figuring out simple riddles or studying a picture to answer various questions about it. Here is what one looks like.
These questions usually involve idenifying objects by their shapes or colours and couting them.
The look and look again section mainly has find the difference type puzzles like the one below
They make it interesting by using pictures of various scenes like a karate class or a play ground.
The thinking section has lots of mazes and picture comprehension acivities like the following one.
The above one was one of the best puzzles because it does not tell you how to sort them, but the picture is left open to interpretation. My daughter decided to sort by colour while I thought she woukd sort by toy type. There are other picture comprehension activities where the child has to look at the picture and logically figure out what happened next or what could have caused the scene.
Experince Of A 5 Year Old
Penguin sent me these books for an honest review. I thought the best way to review the books was to have my daughter use them and observe her. Older one is 5, so she was the perfect test case for the books.
She enjoyed the puzzles immensely to begin with. But there were too many of the matching puzzles and those got boring for her after a while. She enjoyed most of the other puzzles.
The book kept her busy for a couple of hours. Sometimes, she could not read the instructions for a particular activity and I would have to read it out to her and on a rare ocassion I would have to explain the activity to her. But most of the time she worked on it on her own. She did make a few mistakes, but not too many.
My Impressions
Although the books are marked for ages 3 to 6, most 3 year old kids would need a lot of help and 4 year olds would need supervision. 5 and 6 year old kids could work on these on their own.
These would be excellent travel companions to keep kids busy on planes and trains.
There is a slight increase indifficuly in going from volume 1 to 4, so my 5 year old enjoyed volumes 3 and 4 a lot mpore than volumes 1 and 2 that she found a litle boring.
Personally, I really liked the thinking activities, because you can take them further with your child, asking more questions that the book has, and teach them to notice things in any scenario, connect cause and effect and draw meaningful conclusions. You can also show them that the same scene can have multiple interpretations and so one must not be too hasty in judging a situation.