3 Printable Activities for Kids to Help With Shoe Tying

(Guest Post: Corey Doane is a digital content creator who helps Adidas create helpful and compelling stories worth sharing. Her background in digital marketing and creative writing has led her to cover unique topics ranging from business to eco to lifestyle. )

Teaching kids how to tie their shoes is an important learning milestone, but it’s not always the easiest. It might seem easy to do, but figuring out how to explain it to children in a way they’ll understand can get a little tricky. From the bunny ear method to the one-loop and swoop, teaching shoe tying takes great practice. Shoe tying requires kids to flex their fine motor skills, which for most, are still developing. This can lead to your kiddo feeling frustrated. 

So how can we take the ease off of them for a bit and make the process a little more fun? Below we’ll explain 3 different activities you can do with your kiddo that can help make tying their back to school shoes just a little bit easier—and hopefully fun, too! 

1. Shoe tying sequence activity 

This sequence activity is great for helping your child understand the steps to shoe tying before practicing with actual laces. Verbally walk through the steps with your child again and again until you feel they’re confident. Then, print out the sheet and have your child cut out the steps. Once cut out, mix them up and have your child put the steps in the correct order. Once they’ve got the steps down, it’s time to practice with laces! 

You can download the sequence activity here. 

2. Shoe tying cards 

This activity is where the shoe-tying fun starts. Print out the shoe templates and cut them out. This step is optional, but for a little more stability, glue cardboard to the back of each cutout. This can make it easier for your child to grasp the cutouts when practicing. Then, use a hole puncher to punch out the holes where the laces will go. 

Once the holes are punched out, lace the shoes up with two different colored laces. Having two colors can help your child differentiate one lace from the other, making the learning process a bit easier. Once you’ve got it all set up, verbally walk them through the steps as they practice with the laces. 

Children often get frustrated with this step, so be patient and make sure to keep encouraging and motivating them along the way!

You can download the shoe-tying cards here. 

3. Shoe tying certificate 

Once they’ve mastered shoe tying on the printable cards and on their own shoes, congratulate them on this win with a shoe tying certificate! This is a huge milestone, so let them know you’re proud of them. Fill out the certificate with their name and let them know they’re now a part of the Adidas shoe tying club! 

You can download the shoe-tying certificate here. 

Though shoe tying isn’t always the easiest concept to teach, these shoe-tying printables can hopefully make it a little bit easier on you and your kiddo. 

 

High-Leverage Practice 12: Instruction

I am going to discuss High-Leverage Practices as mentioned on the CEC website organized around four aspects of practice. I hope you will join in the conversation!

HLP12 Systematically design instruction toward a specific learning goal.

It is important that instruction is sequential, and each skill builds on the foundation of already mastered skills.

It doesn’t do the student any good if he has to jump around from skill to skill without learning the basics or the skills needed as perquisites for the new skill. This will only cause frustration for both the student and the teacher.

If I see that a student needs to work on a specific goal, I like to list the skills that he will need to successfully achieve this goal.

Once I have a list of skills, I prioritize them in the sequential order that the student needs to learn them. Each skill will build on the previous skill learned.

After I list the skills, I need to look at what it will take for the student to show me that he has mastered the skill. How many times do I want him to successfully complete the skill? How many trials will I give him for the assessment? What does he have to do exactly to show the skill has been mastered.

It is important to keep data on each skill and the percentage of mastery. Using graphs or charts will help the student self-monitor his progress along with the teacher.

Each of these steps is a way to systematically design instruction towards a specific learning goal.

How do you design your instruction? Please share.

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

Teaching Sequencing

Recently a friend of mine told me that her daughter was having trouble with sequencing and I started to think of what activities would help her. Here are some ideas that I thought about.

1.     Get old picture books from yard sales and tear out 3 pages showing the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. Have the person put them in order. Then slowly increase the number of pages for sequencing.

2.     Have the person tell you a what they did yesterday. Write them on sentence strips. Have the person draw a picture of each sentence on separate pieces of paper. Mix up the stentences strips and have the person put these in order.

3.     Write a 5 sentence story with each sentence on a sentence strip. Have the person draw a picture for each sentence on separate pieces of paper. Mix up the pictures and have them put the pictures in order. Then have them put the sentences beside each picture. Next mix up the sentences and have them put them in order.

4.     Write an easy recipe on sentence strips. Have the person draw a picture for each step. Mix up the pictures and have the person put them in order. Then mix up the sentence strips and put them in order.

5.     Have them think of something they like to do. First have them write down the steps and then practice actually doing each step. Let them add anything they forgot. Then teach someone else to do it either in person or by making a video demonstrating how to do it.

 What suggestions do you have for teaching sequencing? Please share.