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Celebrating Left Handers Day

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Left Handers Day is celebrated annually on August 13, though my left-handed kiddo will tell you we celebrate it all the time. Did you know about 10 percent of the population is left handed?

According to data gathered by leftyfretz.com, the nation with the highest population of lefties is the Netherlands, followed closely by the United States. Other top countries for southpaws include Canada, the United Kingdom and France, all of which had more than 10 percent of their population among the left handed. Apparently just 3.5 percent of the population of China is left handed.

The Left Handers Day website says that it’s thought there are more left handed women than men.

Scientists don’t actually know why people are born left handed, as both genetics and environment seem to play a role. Among those who completed a survey at the Left Handers Day website, 14 percent said their mother was left handed, and 13 percent said their father was. Eleven percent of all left handed people’s direct relatives were also left handed.

Check the website linked above for more interesting left handed facts. I find it interesting that in their survey, 98 percent of respondents said they write or draw with their left hand, but only 68 percent use scissors with their left hand. This is my daughter’s experience, too, as I’m not sure her preschool had left-handed scissors and her teacher just taught her the same way she was teaching everyone else.

If you have a leftie in your life, make them feel special this day! You can celebrate by having all the right-handed students/people in your family attempt to do things with their left hand, or do a little report on a famous left-handed person (a few to choose from: Barak Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, Bill Gates, Leonardo DaVinci).

Do you celebrate Left Handers Day? I’d love to hear what you do!

[Image by Anna Prosekova from Pixabay]

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Gross Motor Math Ideas

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone. 

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills. 

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on. 

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too. 

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too. 

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