Threading is one of the oldest and most popular activities for children of various ages. With hundreds of fun variations that kids love, it is surprising to know that it is also a great developmental tool!
Threading involves both sides of the body, which helps to strengthen bilateral coordination. By moving an item from one side of the body to the other, they are crossing their mid-line. Exercises in crossing the mid-line require both sides of the brain to communicate and coordinate your child’s movement.
As your child moves an item around in their hands, they are exercising the muscles in their hands and fingers. By grasping the item and thread/stick your child is practicing their pencil grip. Without realizing it your child is using their fine motor skills to pinch and hold through the entire activity.
This can also be a great matching activity, which stimulates your child’s cognitive skills as they find similar and different items. Hand drawn cards showing a pattern to copy will help develop your child’s visual discrimination skills. For the older children this allows them to create patterns which require creativity, memory as well as perceptual skills.
Threading is not only fabulous for developing essential fine motor skills but can also be used to introduce young children to a variety of mathematical concepts such as colours, patterns, shapes and counting.
Aside from all the developmental and educational benefits, threading also provides your child with a sense of completion.
As this is something that they are mostly able to do alone it is also something they can be proud of doing by themselves!
Boys generally love all activities relating to ‘gross’ motor skills like kicking a ball or climbing the furniture. Finding that window of opportunity each day to engage our boys in a fine motor task is particularly important.
In This Issue
Students learnt online the art of threading, using flowers & palm ekle broomsticks for their Hand Work lesson. To display their talents, a bottle/jar was covered with coloured paper or painted & then filled with sand/soil, to be used as a vase.