What can parents do to help children develop to their full potential? Remember Joye Newman and Carol Kranowitz and their highly regarded book, Growing an In-Sync Child: Simple, Fun Activities to Help Every Child Develop, Learn, and Grow? Now these experts in child development have just come out with In-Sync Activity Cards: 50 Simple, New Activities to Help Children Develop, Learn, and Grow! Based on their book, these cards are also for ALL children of all abilities. And the same high quality standard you are accustomed to find in other Newman and Kranowitz products is found in this small box of activity cards. Parents, teachers, Early Intervention programs, and all who work with young children will surely be eager to get this easy-to-use resource. Each card is a complete lesson plan and tells you why and how the activity works, what you need for it, ways to make it more challenging, and what to look for.

Why is early motor development vital to children and hence the use of these activity cards? 

Teachers, pediatricians, and specialists know that early motor development is important to a child’s physical, emotional, academic, and overall success. The authors have summarized on one card entitled, “Movement Gets Us In Sync!” how vital it is to get kids to “MOVE” to sharpen their three essential skills:

• Sensory Skills: Include Tactile processing, Vestibular processing, and Proprioception.
• Perceptual Skills: Include Balance, Bilateral coordination, Directionality, Laterality, Midline crossing, Motor planning, and Spatial awareness.
• Visual Skills: Include Vision, Binocularity, and Visual tracking.

Remember—it takes only a few minutes each day to give your child moving experiences that will last a lifetime.

Joye Newman and Carol Kranowitz

How do parents/caregivers help their children develop these fundamental skills?

The best way to get your children moving is by encouraging and facilitating good-old-fashion playing outdoors, rolling down hills, climbing trees, building things, playing tag, and playing with balls. Oops, your kids don’t do those things for various, legitimate reasons. What could be Plan B? You will find all you need with the In-Sync Activity Cards: 50 Simple, New Activities to Help Children Develop, Learn, and Grow! by Joye Newman and Carol Kranowitz.

The authors have an important reminder for child caregivers, “Remember—it takes only a few minutes each day to give your child moving experiences that will last a lifetime.”

Features of the In-Sync Activity Cards

Step-by-step Instructions: Like the beginning of a book, the first five cards have a Table of Contents, an explanation of how to get started, helpful hints to make the activities more successful, and an awesome card, Get In Sync—in Seconds! This last card lets YOU design different and FUN activities in an instant using their well thought out plan. You just change one word from one of their seven columns and your child has a new, challenging activity. The combinations are numerous assuring days and days of well planned activities by two experts. This is only the bonus card and  you have fifty others to choose from!

Developmentally based: The activities are color coded for three skill levels, preschooler, primary-school child, and elementary-school child.

Complete Lesson Plans: Every card has all the instructions an adult needs to organize that activity. Each activity card, 5inch by 7inch, has five sub-headings:

• What You Need: You will be happy to see the equipment is simple and not expensive. Some items needed are a length of rope, miniature or larger trampoline, Hula-hoops, chalkboard, beanbags, crayons and chalk, pail and painter’s brush, paper clips, plastic tub, pair of pom-poms, deck of cards, tennis ball, and some need NO equipment.
• What You Do: Example taken from a Beginner Activity called Hoopy Day and uses a Hula-hoop:

1. Place the hoop on the floor and stand in it.
2. Put your nose outside the hoop.
3. Put two feet out of the hoop and keep the rest of you in the hoop.
4. Put just one elbow and one knee outside the hoop.
5. Put your head outside the hoop.
6. Etc

• Helps Your Child Develop and Enhance… For the Hoopy Day activity above: Body awareness (for dressing himself) Motor planning (for coordinating one movement with another) Spatial awareness (for playing hide-and-seek)
• Ways to Make It More Challenging…For the Hoopy Day activity: Keep your chin in the hoop and the rest of yourself out of the hoop. Place one hand and one foot on the floor outside the hoop, and move forward and backward around the hoop. Etc.
• What to Look For… For the Hoopy Day Activity: He located and moves his body parts as requested. He can isolate his specific body parts accurately, as requested.

Customizable activities: The authors have included in each activity ways to adapt the movement experience to suit your child’s specific needs.  They invite parents to be creative and invent  more activities to help children develop the particular skills they need. The activities do not have to be done in a certain sequence and the three skill levels are just flexible guidelines. You can jump from one level to another.  Just keep in mind your child’s abilities, preferences, and needs. Be sure it is FUN!

Durable and Colorful: Each card is laminated to withstand lots of handling by little hands. A colourful, realistic illustration of each activity is on each card. Each card has a wide, coloured border easily showing which skill level it belongs to.

Great for Activity Centers—using only one set of cards: In a school setting, a teacher with volunteers or teacher aids could set up activity stations with the card and equipment to use ready at each spot.  They could choose activities that exercise different parts of the body and mix in sit-down activities. The students, divided into small groups, would move from station to station.

My only negative remark is the difficulty of handling the slippery cards. If I was still in my classroom or the mom of a young child, I would find an album, like a photo album, with transparent windows and place all the cards in their correct sequence. Then by using the Table of Contents card I could easily find the card I am looking for.  Other than that, I highly recommend In-Sync Activity Cards: 50 Simple, New Activities to Help Children Develop, Learn, and Grow! by Joye Newman and Carol Kranowitz. Like the authors say, “Use these cards to give your child a head start and a leg up! Have Fun!” 

About the Authors

Carol Kranowitz, MA was a music, movement and drama teacher for 25 years (1976-2001). She was a teacher at St. Columba’s Nursery School in Washington, DC. In the 1980s, Carol and an occupational therapist began screening preschoolers for Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), a common developmental problem causing difficulty in interpreting and using sensory. They guided children with probable SPD into occupational therapy, the primary treatment for this disorder.

They steered other children with perceptual motor problems (and possible SPD) into purposeful physical activities, best found at organizations such as Joye Newman’s Kids Moving Company. Joye and Carol met and have been buddies ever since.

In 1995, Carol earned her master’s degree in Education and Human Development at The George Washington University. She created a course of study about her special interest in sensory processing and turned her thesis into her book, “The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder”

Over 400 sponsors have brought Carol to their communities for presentations, both in the United States and abroad — including Australia, Canada, England, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, and Singapore.

Carol is Editor-in-Chief of “S.I. Focus” magazine and a board member of SPD Foundation. Her website is www.out-of-sync-child.com Find her on LinkedIn  and Facebook.

 Joye Newman, MA.

Joye Newman is a perceptual motor therapist. Perceptual motor therapy (PMT) helps children and adults develop and enhance basic movement and learning abilities. In 1979, Joye earned her master’s degree in education and human development from George Washington University, with a specialty in perceptual motor development. Joye integrated studies in behavioral optometry, occupational therapy, and psychology into her graduate work and developed her own unique method of PMT.

Joye founded and continues to direct a popular organization called Kids Moving Company (KMC). She began KMC because she was concerned that many kids were not encouraged to move around at home and school—in fact, she found that many kids were discouraged from moving. She wanted to provide a place for children to move, play, and think in a developmentally appropriate environment. Originally, KMC offered fun and functional activities, PMT, and birthday parties for children in a studio setting. Today, the studio portion of KMC has been closed as Joye focuses on in-school programs, individual evaluations, and consultations with parents to help them understand how they can help their children become more confident and competent in everything they do.

Joye was a founding member and the original education chair of Washington Independent Services for Educational Resources (WISER), a cofounder of the Jewish Primary Day School of Washington, DC, and an early childhood special-needs consultant for the Board of Jewish Education. She lectures on school readiness, creative movement, and perceptual motor development in her consultations with area preschools to help them develop and refine their movement programs. Joye lives in Maryland and has three grown children. Her Web site is www.kidsmovingco.com.

Joye has just co-authored the highly acclaimed book, “Growing an In-Sync Child: Simple, Fun Activities to Help Every Child Develop, Learn, and Grow ” with her good friend, Carol Kranowitz.  Please visit their website, www.in-sync-child.com for more information about the book.

See our Inteview with Joye Newman

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