Kumon Workbooks

Kumon workbooks offer a delightful, affordable way to systematically introduce the skills of color, cut, paste, and simple projects. These bright, attractive materials are cleverly sequenced to build success, reduce confusion, and help focus on target skills. The coloring book series start with simple scribbling that is meaningul: make spaghetti on the drawing of the bowl, draw some hair on the picture of the boy. Then coloring is introduced using small white shapes within the larger body of an animal, a food, different everyday objects. This allows the child to work on the skill of filling in areas of color completely, long before trying to control how far or how long the strokes are. Similarly for pasting, there are appealing and functional contexts--bright pictures of food to paste onto a picture of a plate, clothes, shoes, and hat to paste onto the picture of a person. For children whose motor skills are only emerging but have higher cognitive skills, the materials become nicely age appropriate and something all children want to do. Though you might be tempted to photocopy the pictures (legal or not!) the books are inexpensive and printed on good, stiff paper. Kumon materials are readily available on Amazon as well as from the manufacturer and other online and retail vendors, most books are $6 or $7 each. Don't mistake these for the cheap, flimsy, generic activity or coloring books--it's like comparing Godiva chocolate truffles to m&m's!

Why might OT's be interested in these materials? Both for their value in providing carefully graded skills, as well as for the "I did IT!" experience that many of our children often do not get due to their learning challenges. Here are some blog entries from parents that speak nicely to this: