We love knots! Here are our top 5 reasons why you should too!
1. Hand Eye Coordination:
It's no surprise that learning to tie knots, from tying your shoes to essential camping and boating knots, promotes increased hand-eye coordination skills, and fine motor skills too! For the little ones just getting started, the pincer grasp is all important, while older kiddos will get a hand and mind workout by combining different parts of the brain and body to master more advanced knots. Tying knots can also help children with less developed motor skills or motor skill challenges to grow stronger and more confident in their abilities.
2. Wilderness Survival Skills:
It may sound a bit dramatic, but the the right knot, and knowing how and when to use it, may mean the difference between a wonderful weekend in the wild, and a trip to the emergency room. Knowing how to extend your ropes by tying a square knot, or creating a sturdy bowline knot to secure other lines to will give parents and caregivers peace of mind in knowing that everyone on the adventure knows how to stay safe.
3. Help You Make the Most Epic Forts Ever: A fort that falls down is a real bummer. After all, the perfect fort, indoors and out, takes a solid morning or afternoon to assemble. Knowing how to tie the right kind of knot, and a secure knot, could mean the difference between fort shame, and make believe glory. Oh right, and help you build the most epic Rube Goldberg devises too!
These days it's easy to just look something up on the internet. No need to work it out if you can type it out instead. This leaves the learned skill of problem solving and critical thinking in desperate need of attention. Not to mention that when you use your hands and your brain to physically tie or untie a knot (i.e. solve a problem/puzzle), it's far more likely to be stored in the brain and used again.
5. Makes Your Brain Think In a New Way - where will your imagination take you?
Last but certainly not least, learning to tie knots challenges the brain to think in new ways, to make connections it otherwise would not have. The bilateral coordination and difficulty of the more complicated knots fires up multiple areas of the brain at once, as well as increasing the need to focus on the task at hand. And with no screens in sight, who knows where your brain and imagination will go?! Knots have also been used for art and design works for thousands of years. Not only are knots fun and challenging to tie, but they are beautiful too!
Ready to start tying knots? Here are a few of our favorite things to help you get started!
