One Father’s Tale of WoeI have to admit I’m old enough that I don’t remember learning to tie my shoes. I also don’t remember it being any kind of big ordeal, so when it came time for my kindergarten aged daughter to learn to tie her shoes, I figured it was going to take an afternoon and we’d be done kind of thing. Was I ever wrong!
The ironic thing is that I had found the best way to teach a kid to tie their shoes but didn’t even know until it was too late! If you want to know the secret to teaching your kids to tie their shoes quickly and easily, skip down to the end of the story. If you want to know the perfect bad example of how not to teach your kids to tie their shoes. read on!
We started kindergarten this year. One of the goals for my now 6 year old daughter was to learn to tie shoes by the end of the calendar year. Reverting back to my college days, I of course put it off until the last minute figuring I’d have all of Christmas break to teach her how to tie her shoes.
The Perfect Bad Example, Day 1
You know the next part. 3 days before school starts, Dad gets out the shoes and starts the lesson! It all started so fun and whimsically. I took one of my shoes, she took one of her shoes and we gave it a go. That lasted all of 4 or 5 minutes before she was talking about Barbies and ponies. I wasn’t ready to quit yet, so we traded shoes and made it kind of a game. That worked for another 10 minutes before she was walking around with one of my shoes on her foot thinking it was the funniest thing in the world.
She had a good laugh, but I was onto my next strategy. I had her sit in my lap and watch from a ‘tyer’ point of view. Hopefully she would see what it looked like to tie a shoe from that perspective. Then I took her hands and practiced tying my shoes with her hands. After about 5 or 6 minutes there was a frustrated nervous laugh and I could tell she was shutting down, so we were done for the day. Not bad. I didn’t get mad or frustrated. I figured we’d made some progress because she got the big picture, start by crossing the strings and making loops.
Day 2.
We pretty much repeated day 1 but I added a couple of games to make it fun. Only they turned into games with shoes and not really learning exercises. This is where I think I made my first mistake. I told her no dessert if she couldn’t make a knot in her shoes. I wished I’d have chosen my words more carefully. After a bit of complaining and whining, she went away and made some sort of knot in her shoe. I gave it to her and figured we were still making progress but tomorrow would be the day!
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