Monday {fine} Motor Madness!!

On this manic Monday, I'm sharing a fine motor idea right from my own classroom...

I made these...

'pincer' glove for grasping tasks

'thumbs up' glove for scissors

  ... they don't seem like much, but they're truly one of the best things that I've created for my classroom this year!

What are they?

You can just call them  "Fine Motor Gloves," but my students call them their "Super Gloves."

I picked these gloves up sometime in December at a local 'big box' store for less than $1a pair (and I wish that I had purchased 10 additional pairs!). Initially, they were destined for the dress up corner along with a basket of winter outerwear, then I saw this picture on Pinterest!

My first 'glove project,' was the pointer glove. I simply cut out the pointer finger & instantly the rest of the gloved hand couldn't activate the iPad, forcing the student to utilize only her pointer finger for the task. Success! I think that I'll sew the fingers together, like Lindy from the Considerate Classroom did, to help my students keep all their other fingers in place too!


The first 'glove project' worked so well that I started thinking about other ways to use this idea. What about the kid who couldn't use a pincer grasp to pick up one pompom at a time? or who had trouble stringing beads? I took another glove and cut out the pointer & thumb fingers - tada! Instant visual & tactile reminder to pinch items during the task.

Or what about the child who struggled to hold the scissors w/ her thumb up? (check out this older post for another thumbs up scissor idea) The third 'glove project' was born! I cut out just the thumb - and voila! instant visual & tactile reminder to - put the thumb in the small hole & all the other fingers in the big hole AND keep the wrist rotated with the thumb up.

The kids love them & they're really helping them to focus on HOW they're completing their tasks!

I'd love to see how you're using this idea with your students! 

Ahh... Friday!

It's been a crazy busy week - I almost thought I'd lose my mind this week between my day job at preschool, my night work at the university, my toddler at home AND the addition of a class for my teaching re-certification!!!  There have been more than a few movements where I about threw my hands into the air and walked away... but thankfully, there's always been something to bring me back to earth - my husband, my son, the beautiful fall weather, a university student thanking me for something that I taught them or one of my preschoolers accomplishing something new and exciting. I am thankful for everyone who supports me in ALL of my many endeavors - on this Friday, I'll recap with my a 5 for Friday:

1. Sensory Bin Preparation - My son and I enjoyed putting together the fall themed sensory bin for my preschool students. He tested it out and approved.  Here he is playing in the popcorn - you can find more about this sensory bin here.

2. Re-purposed Sensory Bin -- Then when I took the sensory bin to school, he threw a fit! He insisted that the 'popcorn box' come back - instead I brought home the rainbow pasta from 2 weeks ago. This is how he re-purposed the rainbow pasta for his own enjoyment.

3.  Fall Leaves -- At school, we've been learning about fall and leaves - I really LOVE the fall and all of the beautiful fall leaves. Today, I found myself wandering around the yard, looking for leaves... here's our scissor practice tray with colorful fall leaves.

4.  Paper Bag Pumpkin Craft - today we made a pumpkin out of a paper lunch sack during our language group. Our speech therapist did a great job with this activity! The kids loved stuffing the bag with paper towels, painting and then adding pieces for the face.

5. Fine Motor Friday... well it's really been all week. I have a few students who need lots of adaptations for activities, which has challenged me to think outside of the box many times this week. I'm working on a post of fine motor related modifications that I make so that all of my students can participate in activities during the week. Here are a few of this weeks' ideas - wiki sticks to help students look at their work and to color inside the lines and painted fingernails (hot pink, nail stickers and glitter) to help remind a student to orient hands properly for cutting tasks.

Thanks for visiting! What did you do this week? Feel free to link your post in the comments! 

 

Fall is here!

I think that fall is officially here - the leaves are beginning to change colors and the temperature has brought cool mornings and pleasantly warm days! This weekend, my toddler and I went on a Leaf Hunt during a walk around our neighborhood. We collected lots of different leaves, sticks, nuts and rocks for a little nature collection. When we got back we sorted through our leaves and picked out our favorites - they were so colorful!

Then I showed my son how to sort them out by color. He was interested for a few minutes, but then saw his yellow dump truck and decided to go dig in the dirt. This is an activity that I do with my preschool students every year, so I was excited (more excited than he was obviously) to share it with my son now that he's a little older!

 

I'm sure that I will be doing this color sorting activity with my preschool students soon. I only need more of the trees near my school to start turning colors and dropping leaves for us to have a wide variety to sort.

Here are some other Fall and Leaf themed activities that we've been working on in my classroom this week:

Scissor Tray: The kids seem to love cutting anything that's not paper!   We just collected leaves from outside and added scissors. Snipping the leaves to little bits was tons of fun and made a huge mess, but it cleaned up pretty easily considering some of the other messes that we end up with in my classroom.

Leaf Rubbings - I always enjoy this fall activity, but have had trouble getting my students to do it. The biggest reasons that we've been tragically unsuccessful with this simple activity are a lack of the fine motor skills required to actually accomplish it. It really requires a lot of fine motor control and coordination from the children to make a leaf rubbing picture. This year, I made lots of changes and we were VERY successful! First we taped the leaves to the table, with the 'vein' side up, using blue painters tape, then we taped the construction paper over top and provided a variety of different crayons, including fat crayons, triangular crayons and some round flat crayons (made in a muffin tin) that seem to easier to hold in the proper position to achieve the 'rubbing' effect rather than the 'scribble' effect.  Another modification that I thought of, but didn't use this year, was to use  contact paper to put the leaves on, cover the area with large butcher paper, and tape it to the table before rubbing with crayons.

Fall Sensory Bin: I switched out our sensory bin for fall themed materials including three 1lb bags of plain popcorn, fabric leaves in different sizes and colors, 'logs,'  and sweet gum seed pods - we call them 'prickly balls' here in my class. The kids love scooping, pouring and digging in the popcorn. I have students who hate the prickly seed pods and pick them out by their stems so that they don't have to accidentally touch them. We've already changed out some of the extras for a storybook extension activity with props from the book "Little Blue Truck" - so it easily turns into a 'farm themed' sensory bin -- more on the farm stuff another time though.

Today we read the book "Leaf Man" by Lois Elhert. Everyone was mesmerized by the illustrations and all of the different leaf shapes and colors. We will probably make some of our own leaf people and animals this week or next.

 
What kind of fall activities are you doing with your kids? I'd love to hear!

Welcome to Monday...

Monday seemed to creep up on me way too fast - what happened to my weekend?  I did, however, manage to get the flower bed in our front yard cleaned out (finally!) and I trimmed back my herbs that had taken over my garden. While trimming, the wonderful smells made me think that the clippings would be perfect to take in to school for an activity about smell. Here's the before shot of my mess of an herb garden:

That mess of overgrown plants turned into this herb cutting, sensory play, scissor practice tray for morning work:

Herb Cutting Scissor Practice with a 5 senses twist!

Then we added the herbs to some lavender playdoh that I made on Sunday afternoon with my own 2 year old. It was a real hit! I had students who HATE cutting with scissors (because they're still struggling to learn how to use the scissors) ask to play with the tray more than 3 times today!

Cutting herbs and play doh with scissors.

 Be sure to check back for more fun Five Senses activities this week!