Strong spatial skills are so important for kids interested in science and engineering careers. Imagine how architects need to visualize a building to design, surgeons need to visualize operating around overlapping organs, and engineers need visualize a solution to an unseen problem.
But research shows that our girls are born with weaker spatial skills than boys. Some attribute weak spatial skills to how much early exposure our girls get to building sets and Legos. But surely strong spatial skills doesn’t end with how much our daughters play with Legos. Surely there is something more we can do to help her with this important skill.
The good news is that spatial skills can be strengthened with practice and exercise.
There are many creative ways to exercise our daughter’s spatial skill muscle. Can you believe activities like photography, doing puzzles, making maps, and folding paper are also ways to exercise spatial skills?
We can do simple things in our every day routines to help her build spatial skills.
For example, Allie loves getting notes in her lunchbox. The more creative the better. So one day after school I enlisted her help in making her own notes. We folded some cute simple origami animal faces that got packed in her lunch for the next several days.
I call this a win-win for everyone. I got a whole week of notes to quickly toss in her lunchbox and she got to creatively build her spatial skills!
Here the instructions for each of these animal faces:
How did your creative spatial skill building go? Let me know here on the blog. I’ll be posting several other ideas in the days ahead!
Until then, have an amazing Thursday!
My spatial skill activity is Sudoku.