Free Halloween Body Awareness Puzzles for Improved Body Awareness

This post provides you with our Halloween Body Awareness Puzzles packet to help children improve their body awareness and visual motor skills. Integrated Learning Strategies (ILS) is a learning and academic center. As a reminder, ILS is not a health care provider and none of our materials or services provide a diagnosis or treatment of a specific condition or learning challenge you may see in your child or student. If you seek a diagnosis or treatment for your child or student, please contact a trained professional who can provide an evaluation of the child.

Halloween is the perfect time to improve a child’s body awareness. With all the witches, mummies, vampires and skeletons, it’s the time where you can really encourage kids to move their bodies in creative ways.

Because kids use their bodies in space to sit, stand, and move about the classroom, they depend on both their body awareness and visual motor skills to support their movement throughout the day. Each movement the child makes is typically seamless and requires no thought when these skills are fully developed. However, if a child hasn’t built a foundation for body awareness, you may start to see trouble with their proprioceptive system.

To help children develop these skills, we have created some body awareness puzzles for kids to use as a way to identify body parts and where they fit on their bodies. Not only can these puzzles enhance the child’s understanding of where their body fits in the world around them, it also requires them to use their visual spatial skills. Both skills often work together and are needed to fully support the child’s proprioceptive system.

Importance of Body Awareness

Children who have not developed their body and spatial awareness skills have trouble with sensory stimuli within their environment. The child often appears to be distracted and can’t focus on what the teacher is teaching. Moving their body often consumes all their mental and physical energy, which makes it so they can’t concentrate on the tasks they need to complete. You may often see the child out of their desk or struggling to sit still. The child may also experience trouble with pencil grip, pencil pressure, and handwriting skills as they learn to write across the page.

Research shows, when we build these skills, as well as the child’s proprioceptive system, the child can then put their full attention on what is being taught in the classroom rather than keeping their body still or seated.

If your child or students struggle with body awareness you may notice the child doing the following:

• Runs into furniture
• Often trips or seems clumsy
• Avoids physical activity
• Displays ADHD-like behaviors
• Observes their movement (watching their feet while running)
• Lacks muscle tone
• Runs into friends or peers when playing
• Doesn’t understand personal boundaries

For more body awareness activities to help kids strengthen the foundation for learning and attention and focus, click here.

Halloween Body Awareness Puzzles Packet

The Halloween Body Awareness Puzzles packet was created for parents, therapists, teachers and educators who are working to help kids develop their body awareness skills. These puzzle activities are also perfect for strengthening a child’s visual motor skills and spatial awareness.

When working with children to complete the puzzles, keep the following in mind:

• As children complete the puzzles, have them focus on where the body parts go and where they are in relation to their own body.
• Help children utilize the puzzles to create their own movement (“can you also move like a mummy?” or “can you also fly your broom around like a witch?”).
• If possible, engage the child in movement while completing the puzzles (for example, have the child tape the puzzle pieces on the wall so they are working on a vertical surface for improved body and spatial awareness).
• To further the child’s visual motor skills, ask them to match certain colors and look for puzzle pieces that are shaped similarly or differently.
• You can also help kids determine which pieces are missing and how they fit together using size, direction or color.

Adjust the activities to the child’s level. An older child may even benefit from the activity packet if they struggle on basic concepts or if their skills are delayed. The free PDF activity packet is a digital copy only and can be saved directly to your computer or hard drive.

After the activity packet is saved, use the digital copy to print and re-print copies so the child can perform the exercises multiple times. Or, the activity packet can be used for multiple students.

To get your copy of the Halloween Body Awareness Puzzles Packet, enter your email address in the form below.

Integrated Learning Strategies is a Utah-based center dedicated to helping mainstream children and children with learning challenges achieve academic success. Our services provide kids with non-traditional tutoring programs within the Davis County, Kaysville, Layton, Syracuse, Farmington, and Centerville areas. Areas to find Integrated Learning Strategies include: Reading tutors in Kaysville, Math tutors in Kaysville, Common Core Tutors in Kaysville, Tutors in Utah, Utah Tutoring Programs