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Fine Motor Coordination and Strength Activities with Built-In Language Opportunities By Karen Nemeth from www.LanguageCastle.com
Try these language-filled activities to build fine motor strength and coordination for an extraordinary return to school this year. Real items are great conversation starters, especially for children who are dual or multilingual language learners. Use them to support home language as well as new language at home and at school. Enhance a sense of belonging when you invite families to provide familiar items from home. All of these factors work together to build on each child’s strengths and help them catch up and move up to succeed in school.
| Meaningful manipulative | Use it for: | Talk about: | ||
| Squeeze bottles filled with water, paint, or condiments | Filling, shaking, aiming, and squeezing | Color and design made by child | ||
| Potato masher | Mash play dough, fruit for salad, or cooked, cooled potatoes | How it works, why it helps us in cooking, the impressions it makes | ||
| Garlic press | Squeeze play dough through the tiny holes to make string, hair, pretend spaghetti | Ways to use the strings of dough | ||
| Plastic knives | Cut playdough, clay, styrofoam | Pretending to cut food, make shapes | ||
| Cookie cutters | Cut shapes of play dough, bread, cheese, vegetables or trace shapes for artwork | Shapes and ways to use them | ||
| Icing bags with different decorating tips | Fill with soft dough for play or cheese spread, ice cream, whipped potatoes, and practice squeezing while writing or drawing | The process of filling and designing with this tool, and the different shapes and effects you can make | ||
| Safe knives and serving tongs | Let children cut and serve their own food at meals | Safety, actions, and the different types of foods | ||
| Pass food, implements, materials around the table | Practice reaching across the midline by passing food and cutlery around the table during meals, or passing markers, magnets, or other supplies around for group activities | Careful and respectful ways to pass things around and discussing the items being passed | ||
| Cooking and baking | Us skills like careful pouring, measuring, stirring, molding | Ingredients, tastes, smells, appearance, texture, numbers, proportions, changes with mixing and heating, serving | ||
| Spoon races | Use spoons to carefully carry raw egg or something heavier like potato, rock, or lump of clay to race to finish line without dropping | Balance, speed, weight, size, competing, winning, cooperating and helping teammates | ||
| Heavy nuts and bolts | Sort the sizes that go together and practice screwing the nuts on and off the bolts | Ways to use nuts and bolts, finding them around the environment, how to look for matching features | ||
| Make cardboard puzzles | Children cut cereal or food containers or glue favorite pictures onto cardboard, then cut apart and use as puzzles | Practicing the skills, and the pictures themselves. Use pictures that represent favorite books, activities, or familiar sights | ||
| Large paper clipped or taped to fence or wall outdoors | For vertical painting/drawing movements | Large and small arm movements and the topics of the child’s art | ||
| Collaborative art projects | Working together on one surface encourages children to reach across the midline to use art skills and tools. | The art, the media, the techniques, colors, textures, and about working together | ||
| Dip string in glue and rap around empty cans or balloons | Working with the narrow string or yarn requires fine motor coordination. When it dries, it’s a useful item such as pencil jar or battery candle holder. | The process as it takes shape over time and ideas for the use of the item that is produced. | ||
| Paint 3-dimensional objects | Painting on beads, blocks, cars, rocks, cups, clay creations, and more. Holding the object and controlling the paint make a combined challenge. | Plans for the object being painted, what is easy or difficult in this activity, the paint itself, and the outcome of the work. | ||
| Cardboard packing boxes | For vertical painting and creating imaginative structures | Creating, designing, and decorating | ||
| Garden supplies | Plant seeds, pull weeds, dig dirt, move rocks to make boundaries, carry and pour water | The environment, how plants grow, how we take care of plants and how we use them | ||
| Variety of clays and molding materials | Use different levels of strength and skill to manipulate harder and softer clay, play dough, floam, putty, and molding sand | Texture, color, and what are they making. Harder clays build more hand strength than play dough. | ||
| Lots of dolls and clothes to dress them – not just baby dolls | Putting on clothing or gear such as fishing gear or sports uniforms on small toys requires dexterity | The dolls, clothing, accessories, and their various purposes | ||
| Zippers, buttons, and snaps | Challenging closures on children’s clothing as well as doll clothes and toys take more time but they offer valuable fine motor practice. | Learning independent self-care, helping friends dress, and dressing/undressing dolls | ||
| Bottles with screw on caps | Sort the bottles, match caps to bottles, practice screwing on and off | What the bottles are used for | ||
| Paper, fabric, or clothing | Practice careful folding – even learn origami together | Why we fold clothes and paper, how to fold evenly, and how to use folding for art creations and practical uses | ||
| Assorted musical instruments | Make, borrow, or buy culturally relevant instruments that use a variety of hand/arm movements and strengths. | Tones, techniques, and rhythms, and about how instruments are made and their roles in different cultures | ||
| Finger play songs | Choose finger plays that challenge children and sing them in home languages | The gestures and what they mean. | ||
| Variety of containers with different closures | Collect containers with snap lids, latches, key locks such as fishing or tool box, purse, plastic tubs, film canisters, spice and sauce bottles, zip lock bags, hooks and eyes. | The ways the different closures work, what the container is used for, and what you would keep in it. | ||
