This whole week we’ve been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles at the center. Jigsaw puzzles seem to be the new colouring sheets. Almost every learner at the center has been picking up puzzles and doing them. Young learners who we haven’t been able to engage with otherwise have been taken in by the puzzles. One thing that really stood out to me with the puzzles is that the younger learners tend to be better at them. We’ve read a lot about how the education system trains us to process information in a certain manner and enables us to think about words and numbers much better while taking away our ability to process patterns and images and it seems as though that was in play here. Some of the puzzles have a dinosaur image with some text i.e the dinosaur’s name. The younger learners struggled to figure out how the text worked but were much more comfortable with the picture while it was the opposite for the older learners.  We brought bigger puzzles today to the center and it was awesome to see learners collaborate when working on this. Today we all sat together to work through a 200 piece puzzle. Learners independently worked on different parts and it was quite wholesome to see this sort of collaboration happen. Everyone kind of made some contribution or the other. I had to sort of lead this process but it was definitely one of the first times we have had organic collaboration happen at the center without much fighting with a completely diverse group.  I feel that peers and environment really contribute to what happens at the center. Initially I worked with one or two learners on puzzles but it went quite viral very quickly. There was some barrier of entry with this but I was able to work through with the learners and after some hand holding they were able to do it themselves. Need to think about how we can apply the learning from this activity and also how we can use puzzles to enable other kinds of learning to happen.