MAT MAN & BODY AWARENESS
Mat Man is a tool developed by the Learning Without Tears' (LWT) Get Set for School curriculum
Mat Man is a helpful tool to use when targeting pre-writing skills, as it focuses on key foundational components children need to develop and understand prior to jumping into handwriting, including:
Size recognition
Placement
Sequence skills
Mat Man also promotes body awareness, as its focus is on building and drawing components to draw a person
How do you make Mat Man?
Mat Man uses the LWT wood pieces, in addition to a blue 'mat' for his body, and various materials you have available such as bottle caps, buttons, yarn, for eyes, nose and hair elements as desired
The wood pieces used include "Big Lines", "Little Lines", "Big Curves" and "Little Curves"
These pieces are also the components that are used to form upper case letters, following the LWT curriculum, therefore introducing Mat Man also helps familiarize students for concepts of formation that will be carried over when learning upper case letter formation
https://www.schoolspecialty.com/book-set-1503277
Typically, Mat Man is built by the adult first to model placement of pieces
Turn taking can then occur to jointly build mat man, and then eventually have the student build mat man on their own
These steps are then used to model step-by-step drawing of Mat Man, to learn the concepts of drawing a a person
Similar cueing by taking turns modeling and then allowing the student to draw one part at a time, progressing to allowing the student to draw Mat Man on their own without modeling is the general progression used
All information taken/adapted from https://www.lwtears.com/blog/meet-mat-man