Recommendation: Kumon First Steps Workbooks

We all know that developing fine motor skills like folding, colouring, cutting paper and pasting is an important part of learning for our young ones. But, the issue many of us, especially full time working mothers, face is thinking of creative ideas that also allow them to develop in other areas, like learning various fruit and vegetable names.


The Kumon First Step Workbooks solves that by providing lots of fun and colourful mini projects for the young ones. Kids aged two onwards can start with the 'Let's Fold', 'Let's Sticker & Paste', 'Let's Colour' and 'Let's Cut Paper' books. 

'Let's Fold' begins with projects on folding horizontal lines (eg, folding an apple so that when it is 'unfolded', a cut apple is revealed), before advancing to diagonal lines and basic origami activities. The 'Let's Sticker & Paste' starts with several sticker projects, followed by those that require pasting with glue (eg, pasting a square face on to a picture of a horse), including simple puzzles and pasting parts of an animal's face to make a mask. 'Let's Colour' begins with projects that allow children to colour the whole picture, before more advanced ones that require them to colour a white dot in the middle of an object, eg a tomato. The projects feature different things, such as fruits, vegetables and animals, allowing parents to teach their names at the end. A good way to reinforce what was learnt during the activity. The 'More..' books feature even more of these activities.


EV is having lots of fun with the beginner books, often able to finish around five mini projects at one go.


Once these beginning books are completed, it will be time to move on to the more advanced books like 'My First Book of Tracing', 'My First Book of Uppercase Letters', 'My Book of Easy Mazes' or 'My Book of Colouring'. Here is a guide that illustrates this.