Puzzabilitites/Small World Toys Sounds on the Go is a nice puzzle for your toddler because of the large wooden knobs on each piece. Large knobs are easier to grasp for young children, who are developing their fine motor skills. There are four wooden pieces featuring a different vehicle on this natural toy. When a piece is placed in the puzzle, a corresponding vehicle sound plays. Personally, I do not think it is necessary for toys to make noise (other than musical instruments), however children do seem to enjoy the noises. Unfortunately, this Sounds on the Go puzzle has a mind of its own! Vehicle sounds emerge from the wooden puzzle when it is sitting idle and no one is playing with it. On a few occassions, we’ve had to put the toy outside at night in order that it wouldn’t keep us awake in our small cabin. A friend of mine had the same problem with this puzzle. This problem was more prevalent when the toy was new and seems to work have worked itself out now that the wooden puzzle is a year old.
We have a magnetic sound puzzle too (I think ours is Melissa and Doug) and it has the same problem. The pieces are all animals and make some interesting sounds (you’d never guess what sound a hamster makes – I had hamsters all growing up and never heard a squeak out of them) and in our case it seemed to be related to lighting and to whether all of the pieces were in place. When we switched off lights it would go off and we’d here some strange animal noise from some place in the puzzle where a piece was not in its proper place. Since we usually had at least one piece missing at any given moment we heard a lot of these sounds until we finally put the puzzle away in a box.