About the book
What is KUMON?
Develop self-discipline and...
About the book
This workbook will teach your child how to use scissors and carefully cut out paper.
While completing tasks, the child will move from simple to complex. It will cut the paper in short straight lines first, then in longer ones, and then move on to zigzag and curved lines. Exercises in the notebook gradually develop the child’s fine motor skills. You can play with cut-out pictures: assemble pictures from parts or move the “legs” of animals. Children especially love this!
What is KUMON?
KUMON is the largest international center for further education. Today, more than 4 million children and adolescents aged 2 to 17 years are studying under KUMON programs in 47 countries.
KUMON workbooks for preschoolers will help your child acquire writing and counting skills, and also teach him how to work with scissors and glue.
Tasks developed using the KUMON method:
Trains attention and perseverance.
Develop self-discipline and the habit of independent study.
Helps the child feel confident in their abilities.
The KUMON method is based on repeated performance of similar tasks, which, gradually becoming more complex, allow the child to easily master and consolidate acquired skills. By moving forward in small steps, your child will undoubtedly achieve success in mastering the proposed educational material.
Which notebooks to choose?
The "KUMON. First steps" series is designed for children from 2 years old. The exercises in the notebooks are aimed at developing fine motor skills and preparing the hand for writing. By coloring pictures, folding paper, cutting out and making simple appliques, your child will, step by step, acquire the skills necessary for his further learning. The series included 4 workbooks: “Let’s cut!”, “Let’s glue!”, “Let’s put pictures!”, “Let’s draw!”
If your child enjoys completing the tasks in this workbook, you can continue learning with workbooks for preschoolers. Each notebook in the KUMON series is designed for a specific age and develops a specific skill. Choose what your child needs.
For children from 2 years old.
Publisher: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber
Year of publication: 2016
Russian language
Age: from 2 years
Series: First steps
- "Let's cut it!" - this is a collection of exercises, by doing which the child will learn to work with scissors and carefully cut out pictures from paper. The tasks in the notebook are built according to the principle “from simple to complex.” First, the baby will cut along straight lines, then along curved lines: arcs, waves, zigzags, spirals and lines of more complex shapes. You can play with cut out figures! Completing tasks will contribute to the development of fine motor skills, spatial thinking and imagination in the child. The notebook is intended for classes with children aged two years and older.
- "Let's draw!" - this is a collection of exercises, by doing which the child will learn to color pictures. The tasks in the notebook are structured according to the principle from simple to complex. First, the baby will paint over the white areas of a simple shape, then more complex ones. The exercises in this notebook will help your child develop fine motor skills and a sense of color, and teach them to distinguish shapes. For classes with children from two years old.
3. “Learning to cut. Workbook KUMON" - This is a collection of tasks that will teach your child to work with scissors and carefully cut out paper. The book contains exercises that gradually develop the child's fine motor skills and spatial thinking: first, he will cut paper along straight and curved lines, then cut out circles, and finally, cut along complex lines, which are a combination of straight and curved lines. The notebook is intended for activities with children from 3 to 5 years old.
DOWNLOAD “Learning to cut. Workbook KUMON" "Learning to cut. KUMON workbook"
4. “Let's glue. Workbook KUMON" - This workbook will help your child learn to glue pictures of different sizes. While completing tasks, the child will move from simple to complex. First, he will stick ready-made stickers as he wants, then he will learn how to stick them onto areas of a certain shape, and after that he will move on to working with glue. The exercises in this notebook will help your child develop fine motor skills, color sense, spatial thinking and creativity. For classes with children from 2 years old.
5. “Learning to glue. KUMON Workbook - This workbook will help your child acquire skills in working with scissors and glue. It contains tasks that will introduce him to different forms and develop spatial and creative thinking. While completing tasks, the child will move from simple to complex. First, he will cut out one part and glue it onto the page so that the picture takes on a finished form. At the next stage, the child will learn to cut out, assemble and glue several different parts at once according to a pattern. Finally, in the last tasks he will have to decide for himself where to glue the cut out parts. The notebook is intended for classes with children from 4 to 6 years old.
Well, this month Mishutka turned four, which means adulthood has begun :))
At the same time, the time has come when you can little by little start doing something more than just playing and drawing. In fact, I have never been very attached to age, to all this “a child should be able to do a list at one year old.” I always watched my son and his hobbies more in order to catch and appreciate certain new opportunities and skills in time. Because if you introduce some kind of developmental material into the game process in a timely manner, it will go easily and will only be fun, which means the result will be higher. So I decided that now it seems like it’s already possible to introduce copybooks and other “pre-school” development tools for training hands and fingers, preparing them for writing in the not-so-distant future :)
Did you shudder and think that it was too early to complicate your child’s life so much? Do not be afraid! :) Now I will tell you in detail about Kumon workbooks, which are sheer joy and interest for a child. You still won’t be able to tear him away from such “lessons” ;) Oh, if children everywhere started learning with these notebooks, then there wouldn’t be so many school haters! Millions of children around the world are proof of this, and my Mishutka is among them :)
So, let's take a closer look at what kind of notebooks these are. Well, firstly, these are not exactly notebooks in our usual sense. These are quite thick books with a soft cover, which contain amazing and interesting tasks for little smart girls =)
Secondly, despite the fact that the Kumon notebooks themselves are educational, the tasks are designed and presented in such a format that neither a child, nor even an adult, will feel pressure. As a result, the child will also get a toy, for example, this snake from a notebook "Learning to cut". The child will cut it in a spiral himself. This task is already from the middle of the book, on the very first pages there are very simple tasks, so as not to repel the child with complexity.
Or, for example, on the first pages of the notebook "Simple lines" the child needs to draw straight horizontal and vertical lines. But it is designed in the form of paths for animals or a pool with separated stripes. Great writing practice I can tell you!
Through the page the task becomes more complicated and the lines are longer.
And so on increasingly. Does all this look like the most boring copybooks? But in fact, this is what they are;) The further into the notebook, the more intricate the lines become) So, unnoticed by himself, the child develops his hand, which will later help him better move on to real writing.
The same approach is used in other notebooks. I'll show you a couple of tasks from "Learning to glue". First, here are such simple tasks as gluing on parts of a pig's face. Or arrange the food on a plate.
But on each page the tasks become more and more difficult, which means the training becomes stronger.
Who came up with all this
The author of this technique was the Japanese teacher Toru Kumon, who 50 years ago came up with various short tasks for his son’s math classes, each of which was a little more difficult than the previous one. So Takeshi, the son of Toru Kumon, learned to perform the most complex calculations in his head in just a year. Subsequently, Kumon developed an entire program based on this principle, which included a variety of aspects of teaching children.
Today Kumon is one of the largest international centers for children's additional education. Children study there using the same notebooks, which, thanks to the Mann, Ivanov and Ferber publishing house, appeared on the Russian market. Kumon workbooks are self-paced workbooks specifically designed for preschoolers ages 2-6. Kumon programs develop children's attention and perseverance, instill self-discipline, build self-confidence, and help them acquire basic skills in writing, counting, and working with glue and scissors.
Kumon does not use a classroom model. There is no need for teacher supervision here. The program is focused on independent acquisition of skills. And it really works! Because we have Kumon notebooks in an accessible place, and every day Mishutka himself takes the desired allowance and goes to complete new tasks. I don’t put pressure on him at all, I don’t ask him, he’s interested in it or he just wants to occupy his time, so he takes it and cuts it out, or goes through labyrinths, or draws, or draws in copybooks.
The task of parents is simply to be a mentor, show direction, support and praise their child so that he gains more and more confidence in his abilities. And this, I tell you, is one of the main conditions for studying for pleasure in the future, when the child understands that learning is not boring and hard labor, but interesting and not so hard, if only you make some effort. I am sure that it is necessary to develop such an attitude towards learning in a child, and self-learning in particular, after three years, when he already has an awareness of this process, unlike infants in early development methods, and when an intellectual worldview begins to form. It will be much more difficult to instill such an attitude towards education later, and even more so in a school curriculum it will be almost impossible to do this.
Age gradation of benefits
At our age, I bought Mishutka the following publications: “Learning to glue”, “Learning to cut”, “Simple lines”, “Fascinating labyrinths” and “My first crafts”. Considering that each notebook is supposed to last a month, we are guaranteed almost six months of daily “lessons” :) Mishutka enjoys creating and completing tasks in these notebooks!
The Kumon series has quite a few tutorials on learning letters and counting, but in my opinion, this is for older preschool children. I'm not a fan of running ahead of the locomotive when it comes to teaching a child. However, we already have workbooks for elementary level mathematics and I can evaluate them. Here is the contents of the addition notebook, from which you can roughly understand what awaits the child and parents inside:
Basically, a mathematical notebook consists of examples of addition or subtraction, depending on the topic of the notebook. The complexity is increasing, i.e. at first easy, and then more and more difficult, a lot of tasks on monotonous problems in order to bring the solution of examples to automation. But there are also elements of some variety of tasks, such as these, for example:
In contrast to such school notebooks, Kumon manuals are also provided for younger ages. Just recently Kumon mini-notebooks “Let’s Draw” appeared, in which colors and shapes are studied, and “Let’s Glue” with stickers. The tasks in them are such that they are suitable even for children from 1.5 years old! I also want to dwell on these notebooks in more detail. I probably wouldn’t have bought them for Misha myself, because... they would have suited him much earlier, but they were given to us, so we enjoy drawing and gluing in them. It’s a pity that these notebooks have not yet been published in Russia for a year and a half in the Mishutkins. But you are lucky, if your children are 1-3 years old, you can already study publications from the Kumon series for kids. The quality of the notebooks is the same, but the size is smaller.
The only thing I didn’t really like was this: in the large notebook “Learning to Glue” there are tasks with gluing certain shapes onto a picture. To make it easier for children and not get them upset, the patches are provided in a size larger than the “hole”, so the child can easily cover the white space without leaving any residue. But in the “Let’s Glue” notebook, which is for kids, the patches are exactly the same size as the hole, which is why Mishutka couldn’t glue them on so evenly as to cover the entire white space. I was quite upset because of this. Here is a notebook on the left for kids, and on the right for older children with similar tasks.
As you can see, the square is slightly shifted and white stripes have already appeared. The triangle, in fact, is also not glued perfectly evenly, but there are no white stripes, because Initially, the triangle was slightly larger than the “hole”.
Therefore, it’s a little strange to me that for adult children there is an opportunity to make a mistake without “loss of quality”, but for little ones there is no, although it will definitely be more difficult for kids to evenly adjust the patch to the size of the hole, if my four-year-old Mishutka is not easy to do this with all his efforts . In general, this is a nuance that caught my eye, but I nevertheless like the notebook itself and the tasks in it;)
Pros of Kumon Workbooks
Thus, from our experience, I have identified the following positive aspects of a child’s initial education using Kumon notebooks:
1. It only takes 10-15 minutes a day. The program is designed in such a way that you only need to do one task every day. Therefore, there is no stress or fatigue for the child! This means there is no disgust from constant tedious tasks.
2. Moreover, the tasks are not at all boring :) At each turn, the young “student” is asked to do something interesting and exciting, and the result is either some kind of complete plot, or even a whole toy!
3. All tasks in Kumon notebooks are arranged from simple to complex. Having learned one or another simple action, the child is ready to complicate the task. He is not disappointed that something does not work out. Even a beginner can easily cope with the very initial stages, and in subsequent tasks you will already have a full hand from previous training.
4. The number of tasks in each notebook is designed for approximately a month of work, i.e. The result is a consistent course of study. That’s why one Kumon workbook lasts a long time, and if you take several, that’s six months of daily simple and entertaining activities!
I want to add one more thing to the last point. My little bear sits with pleasure for half an hour, or even more, and does one task after another from the same notebook. So, of course, it ends faster. But there are several ways to “extend the life” of a workbook, although this applies, of course, to publications with labyrinths or copybooks. So, so that your child can go through previously completed tasks over and over again, you can:
a) go through the paths in the notebook with a simple pencil, and then erase them with an eraser, so that the labyrinth will be like new, at least after the first passage for sure. Children, as a rule, do not put much pressure on the pencil yet; the mark left behind remains weak, so it is easily erased. Just use a high-quality eraser, and not one that smears dirt on the page;
b) you can cut the notebook into separate pages, and before giving the child the maze, put it in a transparent file folder. In this case, the child goes through the maze with a marker, which is then easily erased. Use markers designed for whiteboards;
c) you can copy the pages and give the child only copies of the mazes for each task, and not the notebook itself, so it also turns out that one notebook is enough for long-term use. But it is important to understand that the copies of the pages no longer look so attractive, which means the child’s interest may decrease.
“Why are all these tricks needed?” - you ask. And then, the price of one Kumon notebook is on average 350 rubles, so not everyone can afford to buy a lot of them at once. But I want to note that in the same Labyrinth there are always discount promotions, and I, for example, got these notebooks for 220 rubles! A noticeable difference, isn't it? If you also consider that I took five of them at once.
Where to buy Kumon notebooks
You can buy Kumon workbooks in city stores or in online bookstores. You can view prices and detailed reviews for each manual, for example, on the Labyrinth using the links below.
Download Kumon notebooks
To be honest, before buying these expensive workbooks, I downloaded scanned American versions (these notebooks were published in many countries around the world). But in the end I realized that it was more profitable to buy, because... I found the following disadvantages:
- the cost of printing these notebooks on a home printer may be almost equivalent to a purchased edition, especially when printed on a color printer;
- the quality of “handicraft production” is still lower, which is why the child’s interest is much less, because it’s simply not attractive, especially if the print is black and white, believe me, we tried it;
- most of the creative tasks from the manuals are simply not feasible, because... Many crafts require double-sided printing in a special order;
— notebooks for kids with stickers cannot be repeated, because There are no stickers themselves, unlike purchased editions, in which many beautiful stickers are attached in the application;
- all scanned Kumon notebooks in English, for some this may be important, because... parents will not understand the tasks well and they will not be able to explain to their children what exactly needs to be done;
- studying letters and cursive in electronic notebooks, also in English, i.e. it is not the Russian alphabet that is studied, but the English one, although in my opinion, first of all, a Russian-speaking child still needs to learn Russian, which you will find only in our publications that are sold in stores;
- Well, it should be noted that there are already many more manuals published in Russia than those scanned online, i.e., using only downloaded versions, you will introduce your child to only part of the workbooks. In this case, you need to understand that publications in electronic form are just disparate elements of one single large program that will not be able to fulfill their role to the fullest.
The only advantage of the downloaded notebooks for me was that I was able to examine the tasks and pages in detail, and understand for myself what these notebooks actually are and which of them are worth buying for the first “lessons”. Therefore, you can also try downloading Kumon workbooks from the links below to see what they actually are, how many and what kind of tasks they contain.
Attention! I divided the archives by type of activity (Cutting, Drawing, etc.), but each archive includes 5-7 notebooks, i.e. in total there are more than five dozen different notebooks with dozens of tasks each.
(!!!) Do not forget that after downloading, you will need to enter a password website to open archives.
You can play with cut out figures! Completing tasks will contribute to the development of...
KUMON. Let's cut! Funny animals. Kumon Toru
“Let's cut it! Funny Animals" is a collection of exercises in which your child will learn to work with scissors and carefully cut out pictures from paper.
The tasks in the notebook are built according to the principle “from simple to complex.” First, the baby will cut along straight lines, then along curved lines: arcs, waves, zigzags, spirals and lines of more complex shapes.
You can play with cut out figures! Completing tasks will contribute to the development of fine motor skills, spatial thinking and imagination in the child.
Notebook chips
Teaches how to work with scissors in three stages: first we make a cut (closing and opening the scissors completely), then we learn to cut in a straight line (without closing the scissors completely), we practice cutting out shapes and figures.
Develops fine motor skills and increases vocabulary.
Teaches you to feel the shape: distinguish straight from curved.
Teaches how to use scissors safely.
To make it convenient for your child to cut along zigzag lines, the exercises are marked with places (with an asterisk) where the direction of the scissors should be changed.
Helps to celebrate small achievements and enjoy learning.
Who is this notebook for?
The notebook is intended for activities with children from 2 to 4 years old.
It can be used by both teachers in children's clubs and development centers, and parents for work at home.
What is KUMON?
KUMON is the largest international center for further education. Today, more than 4 million children and adolescents aged 2 to 17 years are studying under KUMON programs in 47 countries.
KUMON workbooks for preschoolers will help your child acquire writing and counting skills, and also teach him how to work with scissors and glue.
Tasks developed using the KUMON method:
Trains attention and perseverance.
Develop self-discipline and the habit of independent study.
Helps the child feel confident in their abilities.
The KUMON method is based on repeated performance of similar tasks, which, gradually becoming more complex, allow the child to easily master and consolidate acquired skills.
By moving forward in small steps, your child will undoubtedly achieve success in mastering the proposed educational material.
Many people ask what is so interesting and unusual about Kumon notebooks... Yes, at first glance, they are almost no different from many other aids on the market. Numbers, counting, addition, subtraction, mazes... BUT!! if you look into it, you can find out that this is a whole training system, competently compiled, selected and has a very wide scope. And the credit for this belongs to one person Toru Kumona- Japanese mathematician.
It all started when Toru’s son came home from school in 1954 and his mother found a crumpled piece of paper in his pocket—the results of a math test. And these results were, alas, depressing. It's a shame: my dad's son is a bad student in mathematics! Kumon began teaching his eldest son and discovered that he was performing poorly in the lower grades. Because of these gaps in knowledge, Toru Kumon decided, his son was having problems in math. He began preparing a page of examples every night for his son, which took his son about 30 minutes to solve and was within his ability. With the consolidation of the addition skill, Toru complicated the material, but only as much as his son could handle. So he developed his own approach to teaching mathematics - one of the most difficult school subjects. And he called his method - KUMON.
The essence of the Kumon mathematical approach is to regularly solve examples of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and basic arithmetic operations. Solve until you crack them like nuts. Once the foundation is built, you can move on. Kumon defined skill as the ability to complete several examples within the given time frame. Kumon emphasized that two components are important: speed and accuracy. In 1956, other parents became interested in the Kumon method. Tohru opened his own center in Osaka. In 1958, he founded the Institute of Education, developed a unified system of standards, and this became the beginning of the “Kumon” epidemic. Similar schools are opening all over the world. Today Kumon centers exist in 44 countries around the world. Unfortunately, there is no Kumon branch in Russia yet.
The basis of the Kumon method is self-study, self-study at home, when the help of an adult is to check your homework.
Kumon believed that if a child does not want to study, he should not be blamed for it. The fact is that the materials we usually use to teach children in school are boring, and the instructions they give are not clear enough. Repetition is the mother of learning, according to Kumon, and regular practice in arithmetic gives the necessary fluency in solving mathematical problems.
And on my own behalf I would also like to add that it is absolutely not necessary to study the entire methodology and carry out everything clearly, you can just have fun and spend time with your child, using the materials as a basis))
I have collected under the cut, everything that I was able to find from these notebooks can be downloaded for review.
To DOWNLOAD need to click on the book!!
Well, you can buy them in OZONE:
Workbook KUMON!
