It’s Friday, which means more fun and exciting ideas for practicing fine-motor skills in the classroom!
If you’re unsure of the what and why of developing and practicing fine-motor skills, check out this article (which I am not at all associated with, but just think it’s informative yet concise) from Kid Sense.
Why do I care about creating these activities for my students? You can get the answer to that question from my first Fine-Motor Friday post.
Last week, the activities I came up with centered around buttons and bands. This week, the activities are all centered around creativity in one way or another. Looking forward, the next Fine-Motor Friday post will involving squeezing and pinching, and the last post will be activities requiring precise and careful movement (that I haven’t yet shared).
On with today’s activities, starting with some basic (and probably obvious) ideas:
Playdough: Build hand strength by molding and manipulating play dough. It’s a fun and simple way to build and practice those fine-motor skills! There are plenty of ways to increase the difficulty level and/or to add some academic practice by encouraging students to create letters, words, or numbers. A quick Pinterest search for “Play dough mats” will come up with so many FREE options for guiding students’ creations.
Scissors: My students LOVE to cut with scissors. Collect paper scraps that can’t be used for much of anything else and let kids practice those cutting skills! Provide straws and other items that can easily be cut to change things up and allow those little hands to build up strength and dexterity by cutting different textures. Providing simple coloring pages or shapes and lines for students to cut out allows them to practice precision in their hand movements. Again, search on Pinterest for some great (and often free) resources to guide student’s creativity in scissor practice. Many of what you’ll find are geared toward preschoolers in their descriptions, but from my experience with first graders, they need all the precise scissor practice they can get!
Doodle Dice or Sticks: I found foam cubes at The Dollar Tree and remembered seeing a post about using dice to create fun art pieces. Draw different types of lines on each side of the dice. Students roll the dice, and add that type of line to their paper. Students could use paint and a cotton swab (like I did in the picture below), paint brushes, or even simply crayons and markers. This activity allows students to practice the hand movements involved in letter formation. If you can’t find blank cubes to write on, make the lines on an end of a popsicle stick. Students can choose a stick from a cup and add that line to their pages just as easily!
Dot Pictures and Words: Using cotton swabs to make dots is an excellent way to help students practice precise hand movements, and they also create some very fun pictures! Let students use their imagination to create pictures, let them “paint” or fill in a coloring page with dots instead of coloring, gather some famous pointillism paintings for students to emulate, or include some sight word practice by letting them dot sight words. I created this FREE PRINTABLE of Fry’s first 100 words for spelling the words with dots!
3-D Dot Pictures and Words: Very similar to the activity above, but with added difficulty! Instead of dotting the words or pictures, students crumple squares of tissue paper or old newspaper/ads (my favorite idea rather than throwing away the weekly slew of ads I get in the mail), and glue them to create each dot. What’s left is a colorful, 3-D word or picture! Again, students can create their own pictures and words, fill in a coloring page with the paper (this requires using tissue paper squares for choosing colors), or glue the paper dots onto the printable sight words.
A few tips and ideas for managing these activities:
Cut a basic sponge about the same size as a small food storage container (both can be found at the dollar store). Pour glue into the container and let the sponge soak it up. Then, anything to be glued can be dipped onto the sponge rather than dealing with kiddos that struggle with liquid glue. Close up the container (make sure it seals well) and the glue will be good to go for next time.
Keep paints in small food storage containers that can be closed and are more difficult to spill for small projects like cotton swab dotting. Using small containers also keeps paint from being wasted, or from kids dipping their cotton swab into too much paint. I found nail polish remover dispensers from The Dollar Tree recently, and it worked perfectly with paint to allow only a little bit to come out into the top “dish”, keeping the rest closed up and contained inside. No spills, no mess, and can’t use too much at a time. Perfect if you ask me!
Put a bin or mini trash can in the middle of tables when cutting is involved to (hopefully) keep the mess contained and controlled for faster clean up.
I hope you enjoyed these activities and can find a use for them in your own classroom or home! Please use the buttons below to share with friends who may be interested, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s post!
