I have previously mentioned how important it is that we practice our reading and writing every day. We have made such great progress in our writing because we have been working hard on our fine motor skills. There are lots of activities which you can do at home to continue to continue to strengthen those fine motor skills.
- Sorting small objects such as beads, dried beans or buttons– Easy to set up, choose objects that can be sorted by shape, size or colour and place in a bowl and then provide a tray or smaller bowls to sort them into.
- Matching nuts and bolts– Raid the shed and see how many different sized nuts and bolts you can find. Place the nuts in one bowl and the bolts in the other and show your child how to find the matching set and then when they are all matched, to arrange in size.
- Posting small objects such as pipe cleaners into a bottle– Pipe cleaners or straws, posted into the neck of a plastic bottle.
- Pipet or water dropper– use this to create art with or to transfer water from one bowl to another.
- Pouring from one container to another– small jugs work well for this as your child gets better at this you will notice the way that they grip the handle of the jug changes.
- Threading beads– Threading big and small beads onto a string.
- Hanging out laundry– using clothes pegs is quite a skill! Get your child to help you with the laundry or set up an activity where they hang up their dolls clothes with clothes pegs.
- Buckle and unbuckling and buttoning skills– anything where the child is practicing to buckle up or fasten buttons, zips.
- Using building blocks– any kind of block build is great. Lego and Duplo work perfectly. Lego is slightly more challenging.
- Transferring objects from one bowl to another using pincers (thumb & index finger) Beans, beads, buttons, rice, the smaller the object the harder it gets!
- Spooning– Another one that is easy to increase the difficulty by changing what you set out. Use two bowls, one with the beans/rice/marbles/pom-poms and a spoon. Move the objects from one bowl to the other.
- Peeling fruit– anything in fact that needs peeling, satsumas are perfect, nuts, bananas.
- Using scissors– just cutting to start with then cutting on the line, shapes etc.
- Playdoh– great for working those little muscles. Making peas or beans or eyes, anything that involves rolling the playdoh between the thumb and fingers is good.
- Popping bubble wrap– this needs to be done between thumb and index finger to be working the right muscles.
- Finger painting or fingerprinting– messy, but great for getting those little fingers active.
- Making sculptures with marshmallows and toothpicks– Get a bag of mini marshmallows and some toothpicks or spaghetti and see what you can build- a house, a car, a tower…
- Typing– a great skill for children to have not just for working those finger muscles.
- Sticking pipe cleaners into colander holes– grab your kitchen colander and some pipe cleaners and create a masterpiece.
- And of course, using a crayon, pencil, paintbrush to create art. Any use of a writing implement is perfect.
Have a go of some of the above activities. They are brilliant to ensure you are working those fine motor skills. I’ll attach a spring cutting page below for anyone that has access to a printer. If you don’t ask mum or dad to draw some shapes on a page for you. Cut them out using a child-friendly scissors and whilst under adult supervision!
Sight words are commonly used words that children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight. We want children to recognise them without having to sound them out. Sight words have been introduced to the children in the various readers. I’ll attach a list of all the sight words we have learnt to date. Please revise these with your child as part of your reading work today.
Can you feed Teddy the correct number of Easter eggs in this fun counting maths game: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/teddy-numbers