We take a lot of road trips. My favorite way to educate my kids is through hopping in the car, driving a few hours, and seeing something new (to us) and historically significant. One problem with road trips, in our family, is how to entertain the kids on the ride. One of the easiest solutions is to give them an electronic device and let them play their minds away. But there’s a few problems with this. First, I usually count these road trips as “school” days, and contrary to what my kids try to tell me, there’s not much educational value in three or more hours of video games. Second, batteries die. Sometimes the kids remember a charger, more often they don’t. And third, should anything bad happen to the device (it gets lost, broken, overheats in the car…), it’s going to cost a lot to replace.
All that being said, I like to find fun alternatives for our road trips. Often this will include books, drawing supplies, and now this fun new addition from Enlivenze LLC: FlipStir Puzzles. We had the opportunity to try out the Solar System puzzle on a recent road trip, and it was a definite winner!
FlipStir Puzzles are unique in that they are completely self-contained. Your 3D puzzle come in a container about the size of a travel mug. The container is sealed, with a long wand in the middle of it. Puzzles are ten pieces, which sounds very easy until you consider that you have to assemble them, with the wand, inside the container! It is NOT as easy as it looks! Right now puzzles are available in two different difficulty levels. Both levels still have just ten pieces to work with, but the picture on the puzzle makes it easier or more difficult. Our solar system puzzle was the second, harder level. That being said, it is still easy enough for an eight year old to do it, if they have patience. Both levels are challenging enough that even an adult (at least me) will have fun trying to solve it.
When I received this puzzle, I immediately handed it off to my nine year old Little Man. He is our resident puzzle solver, game player, and quickest to be bored. It was delivered right as we were packing up the car for a day trip, so the timing couldn’t have been better to try it out. It was easy to figure out, not taking a ton of time to read through instructions and rules. And because it is all self-contained, there was NO MESS! Little Man worked on it for about forty five minutes of the trip. He had a hard time getting the pieces together. The first time you use it, it does take a while to figure out how to make the hook work best for you. Surprisingly, as soon as Little Man put it down, the eleven year old Big Boy picked it up! This kid is never interested in puzzles, but he does love a good challenge. He too got about halfway through before he gave up. At that point I picked it up and, thanks to my abounding patience (ha!), I was able to solve it. I showed them what it looked like solved, showed them how I was able to best use the wand, and then I shook it up so they could start over.
These puzzles are so much fun. We will definitely be adding at least one more for our road trip stash, though I like sitting at solving them at home just as much. With no mess, no batteries to change, and a style that encourages patience, what more could you want?
