All Up in Knots- Teaching Shoe Tying

The Dreaded Question

Do you ever feel that half of your lessons are interrupted by this:

“TEACHER, CAN YOU TIE MY SHOES?!”

I can’t even begin to count how many shoes I’ve tied in this past year. Many of my kiddos came into my classroom with velcro shoelaces, only to graduate to “big kid” shoe laces. So I became the shoelace lady. 

Shoe tying became so automatic to me that I literally almost tied an adults shoes in my kickboxing class at the gym. I looked down, saw her shoes were untied, and started to bend down to tie them. WOW. That’s when I realized I had a problem.

I decided it was time for my kiddos to learn how to tie shoes. I was graciously given these adorable shoes for practice tying from another teacher who was moving to an upper grade and no longer needed them. You can find them at Walmart! (Click on the picture, the link should take you right there).

I decided to make these available to my early finishers. Once they completed their work at their center, they could choose to practice tying the big shoes. My kids LOVED these. I also had THREE kids learn to tie shoes from playing with these within a few weeks. Those same students are now teaching the other kiddos how to tie. Ripple effect! Now when someone tells me, “Mrs. Barker, my shoes are un-tied.” My response is “Go find a shoe ty-er” (a student that knows how to tie shoes). Not only does it give those shoe ty-er kiddos extra practice, but now I no longer have to stop everything I’m doing to tie a shoe! Hopefully now I’ll stop from attempting to tie adults shoes too!

One of my “shoe ty-ers” tying another friends shoe 🙂

Are you always finding yourself tying your kiddos’ shoes? Have you found an effective way of teaching shoe tying? Share your thoughts and comment below!

Later Gators!