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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.

In this section you can find various activities that develop children’s mathematical and numerical ideas, i.e. their ability to cope with the concepts of smaller/bigger, less/more, before/after, first/last, etc., as well as activities that help them understand numbers and their relationships. When children learn to count, it is very convenient to count objects in real life (e.g. stairs, cars and lamps on the street, ball throws, etc.), to better connect abstract mathematical concepts with reality. A very good tool for practicing addition and subtraction are stairs, which can be used in many ways. If your child does not like doing math on paper, does not force him or her to do so, but rather teach him or her the math through games. For example, you can feed toy animals with Lego bricks or send orders to each other by train, and so on.

Activities in this section work either with arrows, or with words up, down, right, left, forward and backward as direction indicators. It is good to emphasize here that they are strongly interconnected and that it is necessary for a child to understand their connections. In more advanced variants cardinal points can be used as direction indicators. It should be good practice to combine these activities with orientation in real space, i.e. by playing various games such as winter or heat, robots (following instructions), or compass-based games.

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!’.