What’s in your future? ‘Fortune tellers’ paper game helps children acquire fine motor and language skills
What’s in your future? ‘Fortune tellers’ paper game helps children acquire fine motor and language skills
What’s in your future? ‘Fortune tellers’ paper game helps children acquire fine motor and language skills
By Beth Daley
October 24, 2022
Summary
Making "Fortune tellers" - a folded paper game children hold on their fingers and thumbs and practice counting and "Telling fortunes" with - has been a time-treasured craft and play activity for generations across cultures.
This single activity integrates and provides a context for children to acquire and apply key concepts and skills from important domains of early development.
In children, experiential learning that engages neurocircuity connecting the brain and hands and is mediated through adult talk is key to learning language for making meaning in the brain.
Folding, creasing, cutting, colouring, drawing and writing/printing supported by adults talking with children helps children learn procedural language and specialized vocabulary connected to numeracy and visual spatial concepts like diagonal, triangle, half.
When children play with their fortune tellers, they practice counting out loud connected to finger movement.
Young children can start with drawing balloons, cake and candles to go under the flaps of a birthday greeting fortune teller card.
Children reveal important information about their developmental readiness and progress, and their learning needs are visible in completing small projects such as making fortune tellers.
Reference
Daley, B. (2022, October 24). What's In your future? 'fortune tellers' paper game helps children acquire fine motor and Language Skills. Retrieved October 31, 2022, from https://theconversation.com/whats-in-your-future-fortune-tellers-paper-game-helps-children-acquire-fine-motor-and-language-skills-189050