Category:
Shapes
Is you child already familiar with shapes and colours? Yes? Then you are probably ready to try activities from this category. Worksheets from shapes category are designed to stimulate child’s ability to distinguish individual shapes among the others in a very abstract form on paper. The main purpose of the activities here is to stimulate the eyes recognition ability, but also to train graphomotor skills and colours. If your child is not yet able to distinguish individual shapes, help him or her to learn recognize individual shapes with the help of a simple game. Cut out the desired shapes from a piece of paper carton and let the child to sort them.
Skills:
Graphomotor skills
Activities in this category are designed to support the development of drawing and writing abilities in children at different levels. To achieve good writing and drawing skills various preparatory exercises are suitable to support fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. When practicing any of them, pay attention to the correct tripod grip, as well as to the correct placement of paper and hand on the table. With the correct tripod grip, the child holds the pencil between the thumb and forefinger and supports it with his or her middle finger. The forearm is on the table and the paper is placed on the left in front of the hand with a pencil (this applies to the right-hander). While drawing or writing, the child ideally engages the entire arm, including the shoulder and elbow. To prepare the hand for drawing some preparatory exercises that engage the whole hand might be needed, e.g. drawing circles, eight signs or other shapes on a large format paper.
Visual perception
These activities aim at training eyes to find visual differences, as well as at training eyes ability to follow lines (or another set direction). To be successful the child must fix a certain image pattern in his or her memory and then he or she compares it with other images. Well-developed visual perception is the key ability influencing correct reading. If your child has a problem with tasks of this type, it is possible that he or she might have difficulty to learn read fluently in the future. This is the main reason why to do this type of exercise with children in early age. A suitable non-paper alternative to train visual perception is, for example, the game ‘Guess what has changed!’.