Melissa & Doug Farm Wooden Chunky Puzzle
Tuesday, 6. April 2010
- Pieces stand on their own for additional play
- Thick puzzle pieces are easy for small hands
- Full-color pictures beneath each piece
- This unique puzzle promotes pretend play as well as matching skills
- Recommended Age Range 2 Years and up
Product Description
This hand-painted, playfully styled Jumbo Puzzle is sure to capture and keep the attention of curious young minds. The thick, chunky wooden puzzle pieces fit neatly into their spots on the colorful board and also stand up for additional pretend play. Puzzle features full-color images beneath each piece to guide little ones. Measures 12″H x 11″W x 0.8″D.
Melissa & Doug Farm Wooden Chunky Puzzle
T. Walker Says:
When I ordered this puzzle the product description said “wood” and “hand painted”, the customer reviews also raved about these features. When I got the puzzle I was very disappointed to find that the puzzle pieces are MDF board, not wood or even plywood, and the puzzle board was MDF and plywood. Additionally they were not painted at all but had paper stickers that immediately started tearing off.
Rating: 1 / 5
Stefanie Says:
My son received this puzzle as a gift when he was around 8 months old. I figured it was too old for him. But i was wrong. He loved this puzzle from the start. the big chunky pieces were easy for him to manipulate. as he grew older, he moved from talking about the farm animals to fitting them into their proper places on the puzzle board. I believe this product helped my son identify farm animals and encouraged us to discuss them and their sounds. Now that he’s almost 2, he pulls each animal out of its place, names it and its sound, kisses it then returns it to its proper place…followed by giggles and applause. I love Melissa and Doug products. …they’re educational and VERY DURABLE.
Rating: 5 / 5
J. Brumbaugh Says:
Highly recommend these. Our daughter has this one and the zoo/safari animals. The pieces stand up easily which is a huge bonus over regular puzzles. She lines up the animals in a “parade” and then puts them back in their place over and over….
She plays with them so much that the corners are starting to chip. THat’s the only negative.
We love them!!
Rating: 5 / 5
goonius Says:
This toy is fun. The farm animals are super cute. It’s a great concept for a ‘first’ puzzle, with it’s bright fun animals and easy-match puzzle board. It is certainly educational, and when I bought it I felt pretty good about my kids playing with it.
I bought this puzzle expecting it to be precisely what was advertised: A wooden puzzle. Naive to the world of children’s toys, I took that description at face value. When I think wooden, I think solid wood, which is what these pieces appear to be. They have a nice heavy feel to them, and when thoroughly coated in paint, considering the false advertising, you’d really have no reason to expect otherwise.
Enter time and a little rough tossing around of the puzzle pieces, and as the paint begins to chip away, another story is revealed. These puzzle pieces are nothing but pressed paper-like sawdust material. When revealed beneath the chipped-off paint, this dry, dusty substance easily flakes off where it can get into little mouths and become part of the general household dust.
Okay, so Melissa and Doug fudged a little on their description. What might have been wood once upon a time is now thinly pressed layers of sawdust and resin, but it was wood in a previous life, and that still counts, right? It’s intentionally deceptive marketing, but does any of that really matter in the practical sense?
I think it does.
Medium density fiberboard (MDF) is nasty stuff. Containing a higher resin-to-wood ration than any other pressed wood product, MDF emits VOCs for at least a few months after manufacture and emits urea formaldehyde for the duration of its life. I doubt there have been any studies on using pressed wood for a child’s toy that may be mouthed and is nonetheless handled frequently and in close proximity to their faces during day-to-day play. There have been studies suggesting urea formaldehyde is a suspected carcinogen; others show that incidences of leukemia and lymphoma increase through prolonged exposure of VOCs in the indoor environment.
Bottom line, most MDF is not something you want in your home in any form, and it’s probably not the best thing to make a child’s toy out of. There are ways to manufacture MDF which use resins that do not contain formaldehyde which are supposed to be environmentally friendly. I contacted Melissa and Doug to find out if they use these formaldehyde-free resins in their MDF. They’ve got really friendly customer service, but no one available could provide me with that information. I was told they’d get back to me. I’m still waiting.
In the meantime, I think I’ll just stick with the old adage: You get what you pay for.
I think the important part is knowing what you’re getting when you decide to purchase it and not being led falsely into believing you’re paying for superior materials when you’re really just buying a few adorable cubes or formaldehyde-imbued garbage coated thickly in conveniently concealing paint. Had this been disclosed in the description, I’d have no gripe with this puzzle. I also would not have purchased it to begin with.
There are solid wood (and plywood) puzzles out there. They cost anywhere from 2 to 3 times as much as a Melissa and Doug ‘wooden’ puzzle (sometimes more), but most have the added bonus of not being made in China; a small detail of Melissa and Doug’s toys that has always sent a red flag of sorts up for me.
Rating: 2 / 5
domestic diva Says:
This would be such a great puzzle IF it were actually hand-painted and made of wood. I read the other reviews and I think the design of the puzzle must have changed. I was so excited about this puzzle, and my kids love it. The only problem is that I’m about to throw it away after just a few weeks because the stickers on the pieces are all but gone. We have only used this puzzle gently and as intended. I’m very disappointed and now I don’t trust the descriptions of Melissa and Doug puzzles.
Rating: 1 / 5