Make a simple DIY shoe lacing card using a scrap piece of recycled cardboard. This is a fun way for kids to learn to tie their own shoelaces!

This craft was first published in 2016 and has been updated and reshared for today’s audience.

We forget, as adults, how hard it is to learn to tie your shoelaces. To a kid, it’s a confusing blur of fingers which their fine motor skills are not quite up to. It takes lots of patience and practice to get right.

My kids are getting to an age where I think it’s high time they learned to tie a shoelace. The funny thing is that, although they are big girls at the ages of 6 and 7, they have never owned a pair of shoes with laces so they have never had to learn how to tie them. I decided to remedy this with my own DIY shoe lacing cards.

These cardboard shoes didn’t take long to make and have the added advantage of helping kids learn how to thread the laces through the holes.

With the help of her lacing card miss 6 was able to tie a bow in no time. Miss 7 still has some work to do before she gets it right, but I know she’ll get it eventually.

Here is how you can make one too:

How to make a DIY shoe lacing card

You will need

• • a piece of scrap cardboard
  • lead pencil
  • a shoelace
  • white paint
  • glitter
  • mod podge (or make a DIY version using water to PVA (school) glue at a 1:1 ratio)

To begin with, sketch a child’s sneaker on to the cardboard. It’e easiest to use a real one as a reference, or a picture of a shoe you like the look of. I’ve made ours approximately the same size as my girls’ feet.

Paint over the pencil lines with white paint, and once that has dried cut the shoe out. To cut the holes for the laces out it’s best to use a craft knife and cutting mat.

Add some glitter for a bit of extra sparkle. In order to avoid the glitter flecks falling off while the shoe is being used and played with add a coat of mod podge over the top of the glitter. This is very effective!

I managed to find this groovy fluro glitter going at half price and couldn’t resist buying it. I also found some matching fluro shoelaces that were perfect for the job.

The lacing cards turned out bright and colourful with the fluro additions and I’m happy to report that my efforts weren’t a waste of time – the girls love practicing tying their laces with them! It’s such an essential life skill, don’t you think?

More learning ideas for kids:

• Create a cool monster munch sight word eater to make learning sight words fun
• Set up a tadpole to frog observation tank, and see our photographs of the changing creatures we observed
• Make your own cereal box board game – great for helping to learn numbers and counting
• Help kids learn about healthy eating with our printable healthy eating activities for preschoolers

You can also find a huge number of ideas on our learning activities for kids board on Pinterest. Are you following us?