How to Tie Your Shoes
Does your child ever grow frustrated with the tricky task of tying his shoes? Do his fingers tend to get just as tangled and knotted as the shoelaces themselves do? For many kids the bunny ear method is a lot easier to master. But even that method can be a little confusing. Why not change things up a bit and provide your child with an easier means of creating those loop-hole bunny ears that sit at the top of his sneakers?
What You Need:
- Paper clip
What You Do:
- Hand your child a slab of cardboard and a pencil.
- Assist your child in drawing out a simple bunny face on one side the surface of the cardboard. Be sure not to add any ears to your cardboard bunny's face.
- Near the top of the head where the ears would be, use a paper clip to very carefully puncture two holes into the cardboard. Leave yourself a small amount of space between the two holes.
- Before lacing the shoelace into the two holes provided, use a black pen to go over the outline of your bunny face.
- Once your bunny face is complete, slip the shoe lace through the first hole and back around to the front through the second hole.
- To the side of your bunny face, write out the following rhyme for your child to reference when trying to remember how to go about tying his shoes.
Bunny Left and Bunny Right
Hopped into the woods late one night.
Bunny Right went left
And Bunny Left went right,
Zigging and zagging
Over and under.
Bunny Left made a loop
And Bunny Right did too.
Then they crissed and they crossed
Before leapfrogging back home.
In reference to the rhyme, show your child how he can tie his shoes by creating two loops with the shoelace and tying them together like bunny ears. Feel free to mark the shoelaces with an ‘L’ for left and ‘R’ for right if your child has trouble remembering how to tell his left from his right.
Once his coordination has improved some, have your child practice the more traditional way of tying his shoes on the cardboard slab.