exercise your childs learning brain

Exercise Your Child’s Learning Brain and Develop Reading Skills

Exercise your child’s learning brain and develop reading skills using tracing.  Tracing is great visual perception and motor skill practice which helps build reading skills.

Tracing develops the hand-eye coordination needed for reading and writing and the fine motor skills for writing.  Tracing also exercises their ‘eye for detail’ which aids in decoding and comprehension.

Let’s Get Started!

Collect things around the house and place them under a piece of tracing paper and trace their outline.   Autumn offers some great objects.  Tracing from other pictures, works too.

Exercise your child’s learning braintraced pumpkinExercise your child’s learning brain traced-appleExercise your child’s learning brain traced-rake   

  traced-scarecrow

 Now let’s extend and build those reading skills.

  • After your child has traced the objects, let them color their pictures. Coloring is another beneficial, gross motor brain exercise.
  • Combine tracing several objects into one picture.
  • Like ‘I Spy’, take a picture of a landscape in their neighborhood, or a room in their house, and have them embed their traced objects in that picture somewhere, to make their own hidden pictures.  Cut and paste or place the photo under tracing paper and trace the photo and their objects as one picture.  They can then write the words for the objects to find, at the bottom of the picture. Great for spelling and language development.
  • Take those vocabulary words and sort them by beginning letter, alphabetical order, number of letters in a word from short to longest…
  • Increase visual memory by turning their paper over and ask them to name as many objects from their picture as they can.
  • Have them look at their picture for several seconds.  Turn the picture over.  Ask them questions such as: what color is the pumpkin? How many pumpkins are in the picture?  Is there a person in the picture?  You get the idea!  Build comprehension and attention to detail with visual memory!
  • Really encourage their imaginations by having them write a short story or sentence about their pictures.

Take Away from these activities?  Creativity is a building block of reading success.

Exercise your child’s learning brain was first published on NutsAboutReading.com

 

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