Quinn has also enjoyed making maps at school, and within hours of starting summer vacation seemed to be going through a bit of withdrawal. He asked if he was allowed to make maps at home and I said of course. So he got out his Asia puzzle and put India on a piece of paper and tried to figure out how he could trace it like he would the traceable wooden map parts at school without ruining the puzzle piece with a pen or pencil. Quinn is careful with things, and couldn't figure out a way to make it work without damaging his puzzle. He began to look dejected.
So I asked him if there was something else we could do that was different from what he did at school, some new kind of project. He thought about it and decided what he really wanted was a map puzzle of Australia. The map puzzles we have from GeoPuzzles include North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. When he does them all at once he then lays them out on the floor together like one big map, and every time he points out to me that we are missing Australia and Antarctica. He likes things to be complete, so this bothers him.
We agreed a map of Antarctica in the style of the other GeoPuzzles would be boring because the land mass would be one big piece. (Although we can always just do that someday like a regular puzzle and cut up the continent into random shapes.) But Australia has states (which Quinn could readily name and I could not) so it would make a good puzzle. We set to work.
I'd never made a puzzle from scratch before, but it didn't look hard, so I thought I'd share what we did here in case anyone else wants ideas for making a personalized puzzle for their kid. (Maybe with pictures of family pets or favorite toys. Lots of possibilities!)
We started by finding a piece of cardboard (taken from the back of a big pad of drawing paper) about the thickness of our existing puzzles. Since Quinn wanted the new puzzle to match the others I let him use a ruler and a pencil to mark off how big he wanted the finished puzzle to be.
(Lots of photos in this post, so maybe it's best to add a jump here....)
