The power of a good poem can help make reading a reality for young kids. From making reading fun to teaching kids different ways to think about phonemic sounds, poetry is an invaluable resource in any young reader’s literacy journey.
If you’re like most people, you don’t love or even enjoy poetry very much, and you don’t read much poetry to your children.
Poetry isn’t scary. Poetry matters! Poetry is everywhere, even your home! Did you know that poetry helps early learners to read, it’s accessible for kids of all ages, and it’s fun and inspiring?
10 reasons poetry is great for kids
1. It helps with spellings
2. Speech development improves
3. Reading becomes more fluent
4. It allows children to develop their own opinions
5. It inspires creativity
6. It helps develop interpretation skills
7. It encourages a wide vocabulary and varied grammar
8. It helps children understand their emotions
9. It introduces different writers, subjects and styles
10. It transports them to new worlds
Coloring and drawing both help kids improve fine motor skills. They also train the brain to focus. For parents and teachers, these inexpensive activities require limited preparation and are well-suited to travel (particularly relevant with winter breaks approaching). Materials are readily available at most general retailers, discount stores, or online. Tech-driven parents can find a growing number of coloring and drawing apps available on mobile devices.
These are the benefits of colouring in for children.
Develops fine motor skills
When your child colours in they develop a better grip on the pens or pencils they’re using. This action and precise grip aids in the development of the muscles in the fingers, hands and wrist. Through the development of these fine motor skills it can help them to become better at typing, as well as sports and other activities too.
Encourages patience and relaxation
Colouring is great for encouraging your children to feel more relaxed and comfortable whilst they create their picture, it also helps the progression of patience in a child.
Helps with concentration
Over time your child’s concentration levels will expand.Concentration is required to focus on a single activity for a period, so colouring activities can help to develop this further
Assists with language development
If you can spend time with your child as they colour, it can help with language development as you talk about descriptive adjectives and the colour names as they take part in the activity. When they learn these skills from a young age, they’ll feel more confident using them in different situations too.
Further handwriting skills
Make handwriting come more easily and naturally for children by encouraging them to colour more. This is down to the hand strength, dexterity and attention to detail that are all developed when colouring in, and go hand-in-hand with what’s needed when they learn to write.
Encourage colour recognition
The use of different colours when colouring in gives children the perfect opportunity to explore different colour combinations, giving them the ability to see how they’re able to change the look of a picture. It can also be useful in making them aware of lesser known colours too.
Preparation for school
Having colouring sheets is the perfect way of introducing children to the concept of learning and working from a piece of paper, something that they’ll be doing whilst in school.
Boost their confidence
Build a child’s self-esteem and confidence by encouraging them to complete a task, it might seem small to you, but when they colour in a whole picture they’re bound to feel confident in their ability. When they see that their picture has come to life it’s going to give them a sense of pride and achievement.
Help relieve stress
It’s hard to imagine that children can get stressed, but it does happen, and just like it does for adults, colouring in can have a calming effect. This is particularly helpful in children who struggle to process their negative emotions and frustrations, as colouring in will help them vent.
Promote creativity
Stimulate the creative thinking of your children with colouring in, thanks to giving them a choice of a drawing style, choosing the colours and picking what they colour in first. As they get more confident with colouring in they’ll be encouraged to try different things when it comes to colouring in, such as new colours, patterns etc.
Samples From the Worksheet
Our Website helps you to give your child a boost using our free, printable worksheets. You will be able to help your child with his grammar skills with our printable worksheets that focus on using and punctuation, Reading & writing.