Winter Fine Motor Ideas

Fine motor activities help children in that they provide the opportunity to work on developing the muscles that will help them write, cut, or do self-help tasks like buttoning and tying shoes.  I offer my class a variety of fine motor activities that are often available on trays for them to choose.  

One of the simplest ideas for a fine motor activity is pushing pom poms into a container top.  We use the Gerber baby cereal containers.  It is very easy for us to ask for them at our school as we have an infant classroom or many of our children have siblings that were born in the past year.  Sometimes we cover the container tops so that they go along with the theme.  The children love this!

Here is an example of some winter animals that we made to "feed" pom poms to:

a penguin...

a polar bear...

On a side note, the polar bear's teeth didn't stand a chance and lasted maybe to the end of the morning.  Eventually we just removed them.  

While the idea of making them look like animals was originally mine, I will give the credit of creation to my assistants.  I often like to come up with weird projects I need them to make at nap time.  Now they often come up with animals that go along with our themes and automatically work on making these the week preceding a theme.  I am so lucky to have such creative and motivated assistants.

Winter Play Dough Mats

Igloo

We actually made this play dough mat by cutting and pasting construction paper together and drawing the lines.  It's pretty easy to make one as a word document though if you want.  My children practiced rolling balls first to incorporate a fine motor activity and then they can push it into each rectangle to make the ice block.  

We used blue play dough for this and I let my class help me make it by measuring and mixing up the ingredients:

Here is the link to print out a copy:
Teaching Two Year Olds Igloo Mat


Snowflakes

PDF Link:  Make Snowflakes Play Dough Mat