BeginAgain Animal Parade A to Z Puzzle and Playset - Educational Wooden Alphabet Puzzle - 2 and Up

We got one of these for our son for his third birthday and he absolutely loves it. Hes disassembled and put it together a bunch of times. Its proved to be the right level of challenge for him (neither too easy nor too difficult). The puzzle itself contains a bunch of information about astronomy and space exploration. Puzzle pieces include the Earth, Moon, and other celestial bodies, and historical figures like Galileo and Yuri Gagarin, and its a nice way to introduce a little one to these concepts. The overall quality is really good. I found no issues with the paint or wood, and there were no chips or dings in the pieces, and the colors used are really vibrant and rich.

Cute colors. Adorable animal shapes. But I still say the nightingale looks more like a duck. New paint job needed there! And while the pig is appropiately pink, it seems to be sporting a turkey tail. Whats up with that? LOL.

This puzzle is AMAZING. I bought it years ago, when my child was only a couple years old, and I realized then that it’s better for older kids. I put it away and gave it to him for Xmas right before he turned 6. Now that we’ve worked with it a lot, I see how incredibly thoughtfully-designed it is. Whether you put it together on the capital-letter side or the lower-case side, all the animals (except the octopus) are looking in the same direction. This helps the child to put the puzzle together more easily and also to learn which side is lower or upper case. We also like to use the pieces as an open-ended balancing/stacking game, just to see how we can build them up. And we play with them like they are dolls interacting. Our favorite thing to do with them is “egg hunt”. I hide them outside in the order of the alphabet (a is next to b, b is next to c...) and it’s great that they have letters so my son knows which animal to expect when he’s looking around for the next one, and also bc we know they’ve all been found afterward (a-z). The materials are EXCEPTIONALLY high quality. This puzzle appears to me to be, easily, worth $200. I’m going to be giving this at every 6-, 7-, or 8-year birthday party (depending on the particular kid’s developmental path) we go to in the future. So grateful to Begin Again.

My niece is only 2 1/2, but I gave her the 1-10 numbered snail for her 2nd birthday, and she figured that out quickly. She loves this one, and although she knows her ABCs, she is still working on figuring out how to put this together. She doesnt quite get that lower case and upper case make a difference. It actually is a challenging puzzle to put together anyway, even with a picture to look at. Overall, I think shell get a few good years of use out of this. I just wish it had a lid for the box.

This puzzle is made of wood and very sturdy. The cool thing is that on one side of each piece are uppercase letters and the other side are all lower case, so you can arrange the puzzle going right to left or left to right. Hence, “BeginAgain”.

X is for xray fish and N is for nightingale, except the nightingale is painted yellow like a duck. I can excuse the lack of an X family of animal, but at least paint the nightingale with the right colors. Or use a newt instead. Also, the pig looks more like a pink dog. Still, the puzzle is cute, and well made.

I purchased this as a Christmas gift for my nephew of 1 1/2 years. Knowing he was too young, I wanted something more challenging-as he completes puzzles with such ease. He loves it-and its a challenge. The cool part? You can play and stack them as wooden animals! Win, win.

Oh I love these puzzles! Very cute & fun. Just the pictures kinda chip/fade some.. very nice that it come with the wooden box.

We really like it but it is a lot smaller than we thought it would be!

We were disappointed in this puzzle. The animals are cute enough, even if you have to stretch your imagination to allow the animal to be the shape that they have made it, but what was annoying was the packaging and quality. The paint on the pieces seems thin and prone to chipping. At least one piece was smudged. I did like that both sides of the pieces were painted, but I would have expected them to be anyway, based on similar puzzles of this type. It comes in a long shallow wooden box, which helps younger kids build the puzzle by containing it while they work, but there is no lid for it, so all the pieces just fall out when stored. Similar puzzles we have bought by other companies have had a slide-on clear plastic lid that keeps all of the pieces in place. Also, there is a picture of the puzzle as it looks when assembled (also helpful for younger kids), and it says how many pieces there are etc, but the paper is just loose rather than attached to the inside or the back of the box. In the end, had to find something else to store the pieces in. This wouldnt be a big deal, except that I also feel like I have to keep the original wooden box so my toddler can use it when building the puzzle. If this were the only puzzle of its kind I had ever purchased, I might be perfectly happy, but comparing it to others of a similar nature, it leaves a bit to be desired.