The app “Learning to draw is fun” will teach your child to draw easily 24 different pictures like a butterfly, a snowman, a flower, a birthday cake… Each drawing is split into 4 easy steps that your child can easily reproduce below the drawing templates. When the drawing is finished, your child can color it. All the drawings made by your child are saved and can be printed (needs an AirPrint compatible printer).
The app is available for iPad and costs $1.99 in the App Store.
With a sheet of paper, a grid, and a template, children learn to draw 32 drawings on iPad, 16 on the iPhone in the Lite version, more than 120 (60 on iPhone) in the full version. Copying a drawing is not as easy as you think; it takes a lot of concentration and attention. While copying the templates, children will exercise their observation and logic skills with the game modes “copy”, “move”, and “symmetries”, with 2 levels of difficulty (only one for iPhone) in the Lite version.
Symmetry Exercises for Kids Lite is for iPhone and iPad. Available on the App Store. The full version costs $1.99.
Tracing is a very good exercise for dyslexic and dyscalculic children. Tracing trains attention, fine motor skills and visual and spatial perception. Today’s freebie offers a mini-book with different abstract forms to trace and to draw. First, children have to trace the form, then they have to draw the form into the box.
Today’s freebie contains a Christmas matching game. There are twice twenty cards which have to be matched. But take care and look carefully: The cards seem to be the same, but every card is different.
This trains visual and spatial perception – important skills for reading, writing, and calculating.
Honeycomb puzzles are a great means to train attention and perception. Today, three honeycomb puzzles with different themes are offered. There are two versions of each puzzle. In the second version, the honeycomb that is in the middle, is colored gray. This might be a help, especially for younger children. It is best to print the puzzles on thicker paper. You might also want to laminate them.
Have fun puzzling!
Children love pictures from space. With today’s freebie, they can trace a picture and then draw it into a grid. For those who are already good at drawing, there is no grid. This kind of exercise is also good for children who tend to draw everything very small.
Many children with dyscalculia have difficulties with grasping amounts or with terms such as “less than…” or “more than…”. With today’s freebie, this can be practiced within the number range of 1 to 10. Children have to count and to compare monsters. However, according to the AFS method, you should not just practice calculating skills, but also sensory perception. Therefore, exercises for visual and spatial perception are included.
“Drawing lines” offers many possibilities to train children’s skills that are important for reading, writing, and arithmetics: attention, hand-eye coordination, visual and spatial perception. The children are counting, they have to decide whether to draw up, down, to the right, to the left, etc. This may look simple, but for some children, this is a real challenge.
There are 5 sheets with 4 exercises on each. The children have to continue the lines in the same way. They can do this freehand or use a ruler. There are also two empty templates.
For children who have real difficulties with this kind of exercise, it might be a good idea to laminate the pages and give the children an overhead marker. This works like magic because with an overhead marker, children are no longer afraid to make mistakes. They can easily wipe them away.
Extra tip: If you have an iPad or tablet, open the file in an app that allows PDF-annotation. The children can do the exercise directly on the iPad/tablet. No child refuses to do the exercise, then!
