reading

Activities to Develop Learning and Motor Skills Ryan Howard Kinney Brothers Publishing

Many thanks to Ryan Howard of SmartParentAdvice for this month’s guest post! Photo credits: Pixels.com

One of the great joys of parenthood is watching your kids grow up, learn new things, and develop new skills. As a parent, it’s natural to want to help your child out along the way. In this article, I’m covering a whole range of different activities that promote learning and help preschoolers develop their motor skills.

Fun Activities That Promote Learning

Reading tops this list of educational activities. When your kids are really young, this activity mostly consists of parents reading and children passively soaking it all in. But, as your kids hit preschool age, they will be able to take a more active role. This might mean identifying letters on some pages, or even entire words with a little practice.

Games that involve numbers or counting can be a great way to get an early start on those math skills. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about games that you would think of as numbers games here. Let’s say your playing Hungry Hungry Hippos. After the hippos have gobbled up all of the marbles, you might leave it to your preschooler to count up the totals for each player to determine the winner. There are tons of games that involve numbers or score keeping. By letting your child take the lead in scoring the game, you’re introducing learning into something really fun.

A Few Ways To Develop Motor Skills

When it comes to motor skills, there are a couple of different kinds. Fine motor skills involve sophisticated, small movements of hands and fingers. Gross motor skills involve movements of large muscle groups. Walking, running, and jumping all come to mind.

Fine Motor Skills

One of the best ways to develop fine motor skills is with artwork, Whether your little one is coloring with crayons or standing and painting at an easel, they are working on their fine motor skills.

Legos and building blocks are another great way to develop a preschooler’s fine motor skills. After all, manipulating these small objects is no easy task.

Want a little help in the kitchen? Invite your preschooler to do some baking with you. Combining ingredients together, and working with dough will both help in the fine motor skills department.

Gross Motor Skills

Want to work on your child’s gross motor skills? Head over to the nearest playground. Most playgrounds have all sorts of activities that help with gross motor skills. Climbing is a particularly great one since it involves doing things that you child doesn’t necessarily get to do on a daily basis.

Swimming is another great gross motor skill activity. Kicking and splashing in the water is fun and great exercise too.

Want to keep things simple? Just run around together. You might even challenge your preschooler to a race or two. Here’s a pro tip if you go that route though: let them win. Trust me, everyone will have more fun if they win the race.

Final Thoughts

The great thing about preschoolers is that there are all sorts of fun activities that promote development too. By the time your kids reach high school, learning might involve cracking the books which may or may not be their favorite thing in the world. For preschoolers though, learning and playing can be one in the same.

Ryan Howard runs SmartParentAdvice, a site that provides parenting advice for moms and dads. Ryan writes about all of the different ups and downs of parenting, provides solutions to common challenges, and reviews products that parents need to purchase for babies and toddlers.

If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog site, please contact us at admin@kinneybrothers. We are always looking for educational content our readers will find useful.

Health and medicine are major topics in our social and media discussions. How well your students understand the news articles and conversations happening around them determines the extent to which they can make informed decisions about their well-being.

Of course most beginner-intermediate ESL students have learned about the body, and how to talk about simple ailments, but Selling Wellness, from Trends, Book 2, challenges students to take their skills in reading, listening, and discussion around health and medicine to the next level. Starting off with a short paragraph on prescription drug sales in the United States, Selling Wellness engages solid intermediate-level students with reading and discussion exercises that center on health and exercise, taking medicine, pharmaceutical advertising, and the growing epidemic of pharmaceutical drug abuse and unintentional deaths by overdose.

Selling Wellness also includes a simple review of body part vocabulary, commonly-used idioms dealing with illness, and a survey exercise that can be used either in-class, or as a homework project.

The way I run this lesson…

I start off with writing the questions from the Discussion Questions section on the board. Students stand and discuss the questions in pairs, changing partners every five or ten minutes.

Next, I tell students to take out a notebook and prepare to write the questions from the Comprehension Questions section. I then dictate the questions, which the students write in their notebooks.

After this, the students turn to a new page in their notebooks. I then read the report twice, and the students take notes. Then, students pair up and work out the answers to the Comprehension Questions.

Finally, I hand out the two pages of Selling Wellness to the students, and the students work to check the answers to their questions, and practice reading the paragraph for themselves out loud.

From here I have the students drill each other using the Selling Wellness Drill section. With this, students change pairs, with one student turning his or her paper over, and the other student asking the questions. The partner listens closely to each question and gives a full answer. For example, if the question is, “Are Americans taking less medicine?”, the student should answer, “No, Americans are not taking less medicine. They are taking more medicine.” This is a great listening-and-response drill, and it further reviews the information given in the reading.

Next I have the students work out the Identification: Body Parts section, and then move on to the Discussion Exercise 1 section. For this discussion section, I give the students five or ten minutes to write out their ideas on their own, and then I put them in small groups for discussion.

Finally, depending on the amount of time left in class, I either set the students off to survey each other using the Survey Exercise section, or I assign the Survey Exercise as homework, giving them parameters on how many people they must ask, etc.

Another option for teaching this lesson would be to make it even more student-centered by having the students themselves run the class! See my blog entry titled, The Oasis of The Seas.

Please share your ideas…

Or maybe you have your own ideas on how to run this lesson. Please share! I would love to learn about any other ways you get your students talking and learning about health and fitness.

Michael Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing