pom poms & golf tees {working those fine motors}

Through my years of working with kiddos I have found that they absolutely LOVE poking things. What better investigation to set up than golf tees and styrofoam. Play dough is great too but lacks the satisfying punch that styrofoam gives. These foam pieces were scrounged from a local electronics store, it never hurts to ask your local shops for cast off items such as cardboard tubes, boxes, and/or styrofoam. Years ago I would set this up with small hammers but the kiddos would get so hammer-happy that the poor golf tees would splinter to pieces. Now we use pom poms to entice the kiddos to poke the tees into the foam and carefully balance a pom on top.

Set up is so ridiculously easy you can do this at home...place a neutral colored tray or basket next to the foam piece and add a collection of poms and tees. I absolutely adore these square malamine plates from Target. The colors are so happy that you will not need to explain anything to the kiddos, they will get right to it working those fine motor skills.

An added bonus to using the brightly colored tees is the color matching that can happen which I did not even think about until one of my students showed me her hard work. I was blown away! You gotta love what they come up with. If you do not have foam you can use play dough or sand and if you do not have pom poms you can try marbles, flat backed jewels (which most dollar and craft stores carry for a buck or two) like these or beans even. Have fun!

playing with magnetic pom-poms

 

 

 We ha

We have a set of colorful pom-poms that have had strips of magnetic tape glued to them. Sometimes they are on our whiteboard for the children to play with but I brought out our round pizza trays to see what they would do with them. We practiced patterning and made caterpillars and shapes but mostly they piled as many as they could onto the tray before putting them away so another child could play.

pom pom snowballs

I made a batch of pom-pom snowballs just for the fun of it. The children were able to safely have a snowball fight and practice catching and throwing. We also played hide and seek with them and used them as props for a song which was and still is a total hit. When we sing it, each child gets an opportunity to pick a body part for where their snow falls. We then see if we can balance our snowball or beanbag on that body part. Pom-poms are really easy to make, you can use a maker here, your hand, or cardboard.

our classroom apple tree

 

Back when I was working on my lesson plan for our apple fiesta (three weeks of apple books and play) I spied this awesome pom-pom apple tree on pinterest. I hopped on over to Two Daloo, the original source and found a brand new blog to love.  This was one of those "I have to do this projects"...

And so I did...

I searched and searched for a budget friendly tree to sue but could not find one. Luck happened upon us in the guise of a windy day that dropped a large tree branch on our neighbor's lawn.

After more than a dozen eye-rolls, I convinced the mister that dragging the branch back to the garden and then trimming it down would totally work. It did! We trimmed two portions of the branch and propped them into a clay pot partly filled with soil and gravel. This way the tree is easily "broken-down" and can be re-used over and over again (oh if I had the time I would have made Halloween poms)!

The children loved hanging apples on the tree and then picking them. I keep finding the happy little poms in the play kitchen tucked into pots, cups, and muffin tins. 

The time spent making the poms was totally worth it! Now I need to find small pine cones...

how's about a little pom-pom play?

what shall we do with all of this?

poms in raccoon colors

first time using tweezers

and so play begins

the daddy and the mommy

partnering up

arranging by size

big to little

and then the kitties came...

adventures with ander and zaza: an impromptu pom pom factory

This past week ander and zaza came for a visit. I had made a pom pom wreath for the 4th of July and zaza asked how I made all those pom poms. Out came the yarn and scissors and the next thing I knew we were in pom pom city. It was pom making all the time. There were pom poms here, and pom poms there, here a pom, there a pom...you get the picture. It was also a complete blast! Here are some things we learned...

 

 

Pom pom making with younger folks is really easy even without a pom maker (it's also easily portable). I demonstrated the HANDmade technique maybe two or three times and the children were off and running. We had to make a special trip to the craft store to bulk up on lovely yarny goodness.

The most difficult part seems to be tying the yarn around the center of the pom-to-be tight enough so that the snipped yarny bits don't slip away. The color choosing and wrapping went by lickety split.  We began by wrapping up our little pom packages until we had a happy pile and then we went to trimming them. The little packages were just as pretty as the poms themselves.

If your child is having trouble wrapping around their hand, they can use a tp tube, piece of cardboard, and/or a wooden spoon or spatula. We tried most of them and learned that a too tight wrap didn't exactly like to slide off the utensil it was hugging. Oh, and for a smaller pom, use two fingers for wrapping instead of four.

 

We also learned that if you wrapped three or four colors around at the same time, your pom-to-be bulked up quicker and displayed a lovely confetti effect. Even more so if one of the yarns was variegated. It was also a lot easier to wrap directly from the skein of yarn. The kitchen floor was covered in happy skeins and sometimes they got tangled but they tangled up a lot less than if we cut out yards of yarn before wrapping.

 

 

First timers can trim their poms just a little, creating a shaggy bit of pom happy. As your kiddo gets more practice and used to the trimming aspect of pom pom making, they can snip away to create a trim ball of happy. Fabric scissors work best and yes, they do look alarmingly long when in the hands of a kiddo. Our mantra to the kiddos as they got all snip happy was to think of their pom as a bonsai tree. Snip just a little at first and trim as you go. Their first round of poms were happy shaggy bits but as they became pom pom masters they trimmed them up tight. I think they even went back to their first poms and trimmed those down as well.

 

There is a lot of yarn waste when making pom poms. Use a large tray or plate to catch all the bits that fall. We saved the trimmings in big plastic bags for a future project. There are a few ideas and maybe they will get made, we'll see.

Not sure what we are going to do with all the poms but we did discover that berry baskets make excellent pom pom vessels.

mother's day make: pom-pom magnets

 

This super fun and quirky-cute project packs a whole lot of color into a little box. Your grade-school kiddos can whip these up in a day and may even wish to make some for themselves. No fancy gadgets needed! All you need is a handful of colorful yarn, scissors, strong glue, and button magnets.  Check out the diy over at scrumdillydilly.