3D Wooden Puzzles for Studying Birds and Fish

My aunt gave Matt a few of those 3D wooden puzzles for Christmas, but before he could get to them all by himself, the little girls griped and griped and griped that THEY wanted to put them together, too!

Coincidentally, we've been playing around with unit studies in our homeschool (in an unschool-y sort of way, if that makes any sense), and thus Willow was studying the ocean that week, and Sydney was studying butterflies.

Coincidentally, one wooden puzzles was of an adult and baby penguin, and the other was of an angelfish. The day's unit study activity is therefore set!

It's good that these were meant to be a "together" sort of activity, because these 3D wooden puzzles are a little too hard for a six-year-old to work independently, and a LOT too hard for a five-year-old to work independently.

You do, however, get to use the "good" glue:

For some reason the girls HATE Elmer's glue, and only want to use Aleene's. I respect the opinion, but we have a flat-out ton of Elmer's hanging around, so until that's used up...suck it up, I guess.

I'm loving this activity as an exercise in reading a somewhat complicated diagram:

And yes, Willow is wearing a ton of make-up.

The angelfish comes together with a little help--

--and a lot of glue:

Phew!

The penguin and the angelfish now have spots of honor on high shelves in the girls' bedroom. What with all the models and kits and other various projects that we've been doing lately, we may have to add an entire trophy room onto our house soon!

The penguins:
The angelfish: