Tree, Leaf, Flower Puzzles

Three botany puzzles, a tree, a leaf and a flower, let a child take a living form apart and put it back together piece by piece. Lifting out the root, the trunk or a petal fixes each shape in the hand before the word for it arrives, and the names then attach almost by themselves. A piece settles back only into its own recess, so a child who has swapped two of them hears it from the puzzle instead of from a correction. Running two fingers around the outline of a piece before it goes back adds the tracing movement that returns later in drawing and in writing. The same puzzles then support the first nomenclature cards and drawings of the plant, for children from three years.