Toodler Kids: fine motor skills

Showing posts with label fine motor skills. Show all posts

Alphabet Sorting Game with Free Printable

I'd like to share a fun picture sorting activity that I do with my daughter to help her learn letter sounds. This also builds alphabet awareness and vocabulary!

For each letter of the alphabet there are 6 cards: four cards with pictures of objects, one card with the uppercase letter and one with the lowercase letter. That's a total of 156 cards.

All you need is a few baskets, cans or containers and you label each container with a letter of the alphabet.

I had my daughter sort the cards in the correct containers.

Depending on your child's age and skill level you can choose how many letters to do at a time. I recommend only doing 2 or 3 letters at one time for beginners. You can also add challenge by using letters that are not in alphabetical order, example x, m, and r.

Download your FREE Alphabet Sorting Cards HERE!

This Alphabet Sorting Game is part of our Alphabet Games Bundle, a set of 15 unique, hands-on printable ABC games.

FREE Daylight Savings Time Board Game

Teach your child about Daylight Savings Time, clocks, seasons, numbers and counting in this fun game for the whole family!

Each player moves clockwise across the board, traveling through the 4 seasons, and moving the hand on the clock. If you land on the "spring ahead" or the "fall back" spaces, you also move the clock an hour ahead or an hour back.

Ages 2+. Simple enough that a 2 year old can play but fun enough for older kids and adults to join in.

Includes Board Game, Playing Instructions and 2 Paper Cubes.

Download Here

FREE Printable Art Collages

4 Free Art Collages for your child to practice their art skills! Includes Build a City, Build a Farm, Create an Ocean, and Create a Face. Includes both color and black and white cut-outs.

There are 3 levels of difficulty depending on your child's age and skill level:

1. Parents cut out the colored pieces for the child to glue.

2. Parents cut out the black and white pieces, the child glues them and also colors the picture at the end.

3. The child cuts out the pieces, glues them and then colors them in. They practice cutting, gluing and coloring at the same time!

Download your Free Art Collages Here

For more art skills practice, take a look at The Ultimate Art Skills Pack for ages 3-6 years. This is a unique set of 20 printable activities that help kids practice ALL of their art skills at the same time: Scissor Skills, Gluing, Tracing, Coloring and Drawing!

Free Board Game for Toddlers and PreK: Feed the Monkey

This board game will get your tots to practice counting, number recognition, and number quantity skills while having fun feeding the monkey!

Includes: printable board game, bananas, paper cube with colors

Directions:

1. Choose a token for each player. This can be a bottle cap, a miniature animal, etc.

2. Divide the bananas equally between all players. (If you need more bananas, print multiple copies of the banana page)

3. The player rolls the paper cube and moves to the next circle that matches the color on the cube.

4. The player says the number that they land on.

5. The player then "feeds" the amount of bananas that matches the number they landed on. (To feed the monkey just place the correct amount of bananas on the monkey's mouth)

Example: Player rolls the cube and gets green. They move to the green circle. The green circle has the number 2 so they feed 2 bananas to the monkey. The players take turns moving around the board and feeding the monkey. The player who arrives at the finish first is the winner.

Download your Feed the Monkey Board Game Here!

If you liked this activity you will LOVE our Toddler Matching Pack!

Free Do a Dot Spring Printables

Happy Spring! Enjoy these free Spring themed Do-a-Dot sheets, featuring a bird, butterfly, tulips and kids playing in the park. Includes both color or black & white.

If you haven't tried Do-a-Dot markers (affiliate) with your kids yet, they are really awesome and easy to use. I highly recommend them for toddlers and preschoolers!

Download Free Do-a-Dot Spring Printables Here!

See ALL of our Do-a-Dot printables Here

Prewriting Game with Doodle Board

This post may contain affiliate links. Thank you for your support.

I was playing with my daughter and her doodle board today, and I got inspired to make a little game that would be fun and also help kids with their prewriting, drawing and tracing skills!

The game is very simple. Print and cut out these game cards which tell you to draw a shape or trace an object. Each player picks up a card and draws or traces what the card says. I also included some blank cards so you can make your own and customize it to your child's skill level.

DRAW this:

TRACE this:

Click here to Download Game Cards!

Free Easter Lacing Cards

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Lacing is a great activity for young children to help develop fine motor skills, concentration, and hand-eye coordination. Try it out with these 3 Easter themed lacing cards!

Print the cards out, then laminate them and cut out the picture along the dashed lines. (If you don't have a laminator you could glue them to a thin cardboard like a cereal box). Then use a hole puncher to punch holes where indicated. For young children I suggest starting with the egg or the chick as those are easier. For older children you can add challenge by punching extra holes in between the holes that are already there.

Give your child a shoe lace, or a piece of yarn that is reinforced by tape at the end. Tip: to make it easier you can add a bigger piece of tape at the end, as big as 1 or 2 inches to form the lacing "needle". Enjoy!

Download your Free Easter Lacing Cards!

Free Easter Playdough Mats

There is something so irresistibly fun about playdough. Try out these Easter Playdough Mats for some simple activities that your kids will love! Great for creativity, logic, fine motor skills and color recognition. Just print and laminate and your child can use them again and again.

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.

These FREE Easter Playdough mats include 6 designs featuring an Easter bunny, Easter eggs, basket and bunny maze. Our favorite way to use playdough mats is to laminate them, so they can be reused. This is the laminator that I have used for years and highly recommend.

For more playdough mats, see our Summer, Fall, Winter and Christmas mats!

Click Here to Download your FREE Easter Playdough Mats

Click Here to browse through ALL of our FREE Easter printables, or click the image below:

DIY Recycled Raisin Box Puzzle

You know those little raisin boxes that kids love to hold and eat out of? Instead of throwing them away, let's reuse them and turn them into puzzles! I created a cute 12 piece farm puzzle that you can use. All you need is 12 raisin boxes, scissors and glue. This is a great project for Earth Day or for any day!

You can use any brand of raisins, the standard size boxes, which are either 1 oz or 1.5 oz. They are the same size in length and width, just different thickness.

This is the brand I used, but like I said, you can use any brand, for example those red Sun Maid boxes are fine.

Once you have 12 boxes you can just print and cut the puzzle and glue each piece to the boxes.

And that's it! Wasn't that easy? Now if you want, you could use Velcro on the sides of the boxes to hold it together as your child completes the puzzle, but it's not necessary at all.

As an eco-friendly alternative to the free printable, you could find a picture in a magazine or newspaper and use that for the puzzle!

Download your Raisin Box Puzzle Here

Motor Skills Preposition Game

My daughter has always been a climber. By the time she was a year old she had conquered couches, chairs, small tables, and anything low to the ground. Now, as a toddler, she gets strategic and figures out how to reach the cookies in the top cabinet, or the light switch that controls the fan in the living room. She gets a chair from the kitchen, pushes it to where it needs to be, and uses it to climb on top of a second surface like the kitchen counter in order to open up the pantry. I think to myself, this baby needs to get outdoors more!

But what do you do when you are stuck inside for whatever reason?

So I came up with a simple little game that actually allows your kids to play around with furniture and climb or crawl all over it, and at the same time is educational. You can do these activities with your toddlers and preschoolers to help develop their gross motor skills, fine motor skills, vocabulary and visual discrimination. Just print these free printable preposition cards and you can play the game several ways:

Gross Motor

If your child is like mine and loves to climb on chairs or tables, or hide and play underneath them, they are going to love this game! Use a chair or a small table and play the game similar to "Simon Says" by drawing from the pile of cards and directing the child on what to do. For example: stand in front of the chair, stand behind the chair, go under the chair, go through the chair, go around the chair, stand between two chairs, etc. This is not only great for gross motor skills but will also help build your child's vocabulary.

Fine Motor

Another way to play this game is by using a miniature chair/table and a miniature person/doll, such as from a dollhouse. Give your child one card at a time and have them position the toys to match what is on the card. If you already did the gross motor exercise, you can remind your child that they are matching the same positions as the ones they were in.

Visual Discrimination

You can also play this as a visual discrimination matching game - just print off a second sheet of the cards, but don't cut them out this time. Give this sheet to your child and have them place the picture cards on top of the matching picture.

For Readers

Yet another way to play this game - cut out the pictures and words so that they are separate from each other, and have the child match the pictures to the words.

Click here to Download your Free Preposition Cards

Free American Flag Playdough Mat

Looking for a toddler or preschooler activity for Memorial Day or 4th of July? This Free Playdough mat is sure to be a big hit! Also check out my Free Patriotic Do a Dot Printables for more educational fun!

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support.

Playdough is very good for developing fine motor skills and strength in the hands and fingers, which is important for future pencil and scissor control. It is also great for any kind of educational activity, from teaching numbers and letters, to science and geography. The hands-on sensory experience will make it easier to learn just about any concept.

Making the U.S. Flag with Playdough

All you need is red playdough for the stripes and white playdough for the stars.

Print the Free printable playdough mat. Laminate if you wish, although I didn't because I ran out of lamination sheets. It worked just as well, you just have to be more careful that your child doesn't rip the paper.

Before starting the activity, show your child the picture of the American Flag located at the bottom right corner of the paper. Explain that we will be adding the stripes and stars to make the flag look like the picture.

Looking for a toddler or preschooler activity for Memorial Day or Free American Flag Playdough Mat

Show your child how to roll the playdough into long shapes to make the flag's stripes. If they can't do it on their own, start rolling each piece for them and have them "finish" rolling the pieces and then placing one at a time on the flag.

You will probably not be able to fit all 7 red stripes on the flag, we made 5. Next, we rolled the playdough into little balls to create the stars. Again, you can make the balls for them and have them place each piece at a time on the blue area of the flag.

We ended up with 8 stars instead of 50. Don't worry about trying to replicate the flag exactly. This exercise will teach your child that the United States flag consists of stars and stripes and your child will become visually familiar with how the flag looks like.

Lastly, we made the flagpole, which can be any color that your child chooses. Mine wanted to make a pink one.

Playdough mats work best when laminated! This is the laminator that I use below: (affiliate link)

Download your Free American Flag Playdough Mat!

The Ultimate Art Skills Pack Review & Giveaway!

As you may know, I recently created The Ultimate Art Skills Activity Pack which is a series of 20 printable activities for children ages 2-6 to practice ALL of their art skills at the same time: scissor skills, gluing, tracing, coloring and drawing!

Ashley from Click here to check out the review & giveaway! While you're there, be sure to check out the rest of her blog - she has tons of super fun, creative & educational ideas for kids!

Occupations & Vehicles Matching Activity

Learn about occupations, community helpers and vehicles with this fun matching activity for preschoolers!

I originally created this printable as a Father's Day activity, where kids can match the "daddies" in different occupations with the vehicles associated to each occupation. Of course there are women in all of these professions, but I wanted to make this specifically as a fun Father's Day activity.

This is also a great activity for a community helpers theme. You can do it as a cut & paste activity, cutting the vehicles from the second page and pasting them in the boxes on the first page. Or to make this into a reusable activity, I recommend that you laminate both sheets, then cut out the vehicles on the second sheet and use Velcro dots to attach the pieces.

Click Here to Download your FREE Occupations & Vehicles Matching

For more community helpers activities, see the following posts:

Watermelon Seed Fine Motor Activities

Like most kids, my daughter loves watermelon. It's quite possibly her favorite fruit. However, she refuses to eat it if there are any seeds in it. Even those little white seeds that you find in the seedless variety. So needless to say, I've been pretty busy removing seeds from her watermelon on a daily basis. Whenever I find something that I am constantly throwing away, I think to myself, can I find a creative use for this instead of throwing it out? Just like egg cartons or raisin boxes or those little caps from baby food pouches, why not find a creative use for watermelon seeds?

Watermelon seeds are pretty small which make them difficult to pick up, even for adults. That makes them perfect for fine motor practice and to help develop the pincer grasp, which is an important skill for developing writing readiness.

So I made these free printable activities which are great not only for fine motor skills but also for letter recognition, number recognition, number quantity, and one to one correspondence. If you don't have any watermelon seeds on hand, you can use anything that is small and dark colored: beads, raisins, small black pom poms, apple seeds, etc.

1. Tracing the letter W with watermelon Seeds