Toys for Developing Oculomotor Skills
Here are some great toys for developing oculomotor skills and visual-motor coordination. We love the Perplexus! 🙂
Kids Need Movement To Learn
In The Out-of-Sync Child, Carol Kranowitz says, “Vision, unlike sight, is not a skill we are born with but rather one we develop gradually as we integrate our sense. Growing up, we learn to make sense of what we see. How? Through movement! Movement, the basis of all learning, teaches the eyes to make sense of sights.”
Kids need movement to learn and develop, but schools have been cutting recess to make time for more instruction and tests. Read how one school in Texas is turning that around: Turns Out Monkey Bars and Kickball Might Be Good For The Brain
Handwriting for better learning and memory
It’s not just what we write that matters, but how. Children read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, and they are also better able to better generate ideas and retain information.
Printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard were compared in a study of children in grades 2-5. When the children wrote text by hand, they consistently produced more words more quickly, and also expressed more ideas, when compared with the children who wrote on a keyboard. The children with better handwriting showed greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory when they were asked to think of ideas for a composition, as well as a greater overall activation in reading and writing networks.
Physically forming letters when writing is important for learning and memory!
Click here to read more in the NY Times