best of teach mama countdown: #3 shoe-tying

Teaching some kids how to tie their shoes is so not easy, it’s not even funny.

While one child may teach herself how to do it, for another child, it may take time and time and time again for her to actually learn how to tie those shoelaces on her own.

Maddy was a great example of the former, while Owen, is a perfect example of the latter.  Cora will be a big question mark, since so far, she has expressed zero interest in learning how to tie her shoes.

There are still days, after school, when we bust out the ole Shoelace Box during homework time so that the O-Man can tie, untie, re-tie, untie, re-tie, and untie until he seems to get it. But then the next morning, inevitably, he runs into a wall when it comes to tying his sneaks.

Like many things, shoe-tying continues to be a work in progress.

But clearly, with the popularity of our Shoelace Box our how to teach kids to tie their shoes post, shoe-tying is a challenge for many.  This post comes in at #3–again, not for the amount of tweets and facebook likes, but essentially for the sheer number of hits it gets from searches, pins, and shares.

Here’s the skinny . . .

• teach mama’s top 10 all-time best countdown, #3: how to teach kids to tie their shoes
  

how to teach kids to tie their shoes

For many preschoolers and early elementary students, learning how to tie their shoes takes a simultaneous jiving of both fine motor skill readiness and cognitive readiness. Learning how to tie shoes takes a huge heap of concentration, and kiddos must be at a developmental stage where they are able to try, fail, try again, fail again, and re-try until it finally clicks.  That’s the hard part.

Oh, and they have to want to learn how to do it. If they don’t want to do it, forgettabout it. . .

 

. . . I grabbed a small cardboard box, a shoe box, and I gathered tons of ribbon and string from our ribbon bag.

I made several holes on the box: three sets of two holes, one inch apart on the top and two sets of holes on each side. . .

 

And if you want to read about our successes–and what we learned that really helped–head over to the original post!

Tomorrow: teach mama’s top 10 all-time best countdown, #2.