fine motor rainbow play

This was one of the magical ideas that came to me as I was running out the door to sub a preschool class last summer. Back then I used a couple of oh-so-lovely toilet paper tubes which only kinda worked as the bands were to springy and powerful the tubes got quite a bit wonky. This time I grabbed a cylinder block and set it up at our fine motor table to see what would happen.

I teach threes and this was a tricky project for them to tackle. I need to find a way to give the cylinder some staying power...maybe I should glue it to a board. The slipperyness of the cylinder caused a lot of frustration for my students. Some tried once and then abandoned it after the third hair holder flew across the room. That in itself was super delightful to the kiddos. Some gathered up all the holders and stretched them over their own arms to create bracelets. One of them, this one, worked and worked and worked, exclaiming when it got tricky (her words not mine) but persevering until she got one of each color carefully placed around the cylinder. 

 

I love the look of this project and how it creates an activity to use those fine motors and to problem solve. I will definitely do this again next year. 

scissors work inspired by Going on a Bear Hunt

The children really love cutting things. Scissors work is a favorite activity and so I thought I would change it up for our week of We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Usually, we cut paper but we have also cut yarn, play dough, and straws. This time around, I set up a station for cutting the tall, wavy grass with daylily leaves as the grass, scissors, and an empty powdered cheese shaker. Some children cut the grass and dropped it into the shaker, others used their grass on their landscapes and some decided not to cut at all and simply fed the grass into the shaker. All kinds of fine motor skills happening here!

oh the fun we had: ring the gack

In One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish there is a page dedicated to The Gack and the game of Ringing the Gack where the children in the book toss rings upon the gack's antlers. I thought how fun would it be to have our own gack? Then I realized I had no energy to actually whip up one but we did have our classroom tree so why not get rings to toss onto it?  Oh my goodness! While trying to find an image of the gack for you I just now found this, this, and this. Fun stuff!

 

 

I originally wanted to use dollar store bracelets for our gack (from One Fish...) rings but could not find them anywhere. I was at Target and eyeballed this set of baby linking rings but did not want to pay $10 for them. I went back later and found them reduced to under $6 (online even cheaper) and snatched them up. The children loved tossing and hanging them on our gack. They also liked linking them together and/or sorting them by color. The colors are super fun and the sturdiness is much better than the cheapie dollar store bracelets I was thinking of. The following week, the children talked a lot about the rings, their gack, and how they connected the links. Along the way they made connections from their play to the literature and they picked up new vocabulary words such as connecting, rings, and links. It was stupendous fun!