Winter months are the perfect time to practice important fine motor skills when outdoor recess times may be restricted. Fine motor work can continue all year as skills grow and change. Each morning as they come into the classroom, my students check to see which drawer they will be using that day in our stack of fine motor drawers. You wouldn't believe how far my students' skills have come since the beginning of the school year after using these activities each morning! Check out how we are working on developing our pinching, grasping, and spinning skills!
To create this simple activity, I hand drew the numbers 1-10 on these adorable Winter Plastic Mugs with a permanent marker. I included the number as well as the number spelled out on each mug. To play, students pick up one jumbo marshmallow at a time and place it into the mug using tongs until the mug has the correct number of jumbo marshmallows inside!
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Next up, Polar Plunge! I created this mini game to help my students practice pushing against something with resistance. I filled a plastic food container with Melting Snowman Slime and placed in about 20 Polar Bear Mini-Erasers and a die that has the dots from 1-3 on them. To play, my students pick up and roll the die. The number that is shown on the die is the number of polar bears they need to place or push into the "iceberg". They play until they run out of erasers and then can start the game over again.
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I created this simple activity to help my students build up their paper punching and gripping skills. I added some Winter/Christmas Paper Pack strips (cut at about 1 inch wide) and some seasonal paper punches. My students punch out shapes and then create their own snowflakes! Their designs are getting pretty elaborate and some of my students are gluing them down on paper to save their work!
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My students love making bracelets for themselves and others so to change up these bracelets for the colder months, I added some Winter Beads (similar here) and some Chenille Stems. My students have to work on building grasping and pinching skills to slide their beads onto the chenille stems. Once they are done, they are free to take their bracelet home with them.
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My students were having a great time using some spinning tops in one of our science lessons recently, so I decided to add some more to our fine motor drawers so they could continue to practice pinching and spinning them. They love watching the Winter Spin Tops spin around and have competitions with each other to see who can get the most tops spinning at once!
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This has got to be one of our favorite activities so far! I placed several Penguin Wind-Up Characters in the next drawer along with some long strips of paper. I added "start" and "finish" lines to the paper so that my students could have races with their penguins. Each time they wind up their penguin, my students are working on their extra fine motor skills. Most of the penguins make it about half-way down the race track before needing to "re-fuel", so it's a race to see who can wind their penguin back up and get it back on the track!
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To bring in some math to our fine motor work, I introduced these cute Penguin Stampers along with some scrap paper. My students practiced making penguin patterns all while strengthening their pinching and grasping skills. We all love that there are 6 different designs on the stamps allowing us to create a wider variety of patterns!
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In the last drawer, I placed lots of Blue Plastic Pearl Water Beads and some snowflakes from the Snowflake Jewel Assortment. My students then use tongs to pick up as many of the snowflake jewels as they can without popping or breaking any of the water beads. They collect them in a small bowl and then compare and contrast the snowflakes to find some that are alike and different from others in the bowl.
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