Fine Motor Fun

It has been a long week!  Adjusting to our summer schedule is taking us all some time, and throwing two days of rain into the mix made for some long days.  We had a couple of detours from our "refrigerator schedule", which is great--we are going for flexible structure around here in the summer. :)  

My aim is to use the same materials with both boys during school time as much as I can, and to modify up and down so they are both engaged.  This plan did not go very well for the material in this post, but I'll let you know what my aim was, anyway. :)

First, I used some homemade play-doh (my favorite recipe ever, and the reason I will never buy play-doh at the store again) that you can see at this link: Homemade play-doh

I stuck a couple of dry spaghetti noodles in it and gave them some fruit loops to stack on the noodles.  I expected Harry to break the noodles and throw himself on the floor screaming in about 5 seconds.  He didn't!  He liked this task, but didn't get a lot of fruit loops actually on the noodles because they ended up in his mouth.  Still--I'll take it.  He was working on a structured task for some length of time.  Win. :) 

Now, what I wanted to accomplish was to have Jack make a pattern out of the colors of fruit loops.  He said that was too hard, and that he did not want to do that. :)  In hindsight, I would have drawn him a little picture of a pattern and then I think he would have been happy to do it.

For another fine motor activity, I took an old paper towel roll and stuck capital letters on little dot stickers all over it.  I wrote lowercase letters on more dot stickers and gave them to him.  He had to find the capital letters on the paper towel roll and cover them up with the matching lowercase letters.  He only did about half and wanted to stop, so we will do the other half another day.  

I like this activity because it can be easily modified for a bunch of different things.  Just matching capital to capital or lowercase to lowercase is a great plan for learning to identify letters.  Matching numbers would work, too.  I plan to make a toilet paper roll with some of the primary colored sticker dots so Harry can try this activity, as well, just matching and saying the correct colors.  I figured that Harry would be long-gone at this point while Jack continued working (he was) so I didn't have it ready. 

I'm getting ready to plan what tomorrow's activities will be.  I'm thinking patterning or set matching numbers with beads and pipe cleaners--more fine motor fun!