Fine motor and maths tools for playful learning
Over the summer vacation I had two goals to work on with J and T. With J we had been asked by his reception year (kindergarten) teacher to focus on fine motor skills and with T I wanted to work on colours and numbers some early math skills. So finding tools that I could work on these areas with the kids was important goal for the summer.
Learning resources is a favourite educational toy and equipment company of ours from my home town in the UK and among their collection they have some fabulous tools and equipment for helping children develop these skills. On my to buy list for a long time has been tongs/tweezers for fine motor skills work at home with the kids and the Learning Resources Jumbo Tweezers are ideal with 12 coloured tweezers in 6 different colours. Each pair has finger depressions on one prong and a thumb depression on the other making it easy for you to help children to place their fingers in the perfect position for use.
With the two children I wanted to develop the fine motor skills whilst working on other skills so we started out with T using the Jumbo Tweezers combined with the sorting pie another fabulous learning resources product which we have used to work on counting, colour and fine motor skills with her. With sized fruit and bright primary colours we were able to work together picking up and the fruit and sorting into the different compartments.
The sorting pie comes with an activity guide with suggestions of what you can do, with T part of the fun is seeing how she starts out – she started out with sorting by colours, the stage that she is at is that recognises colours and can sort into those with a similar colour however if you ask her what is this colour she gets it wrong 90% of the time so going through the colours we chatted about the names and other things that could be those colours.
As I mentioned we have been asked by J’s teacher last year to work on fine motor skills so using a combination of the Jumbo Tweezers with Learning resources Wild About Animals Jungle Counters to incorporate fine motor skills into some maths revision of sorting and sequencing.
Using the jungle counters we mixed them up in a pile and then sorted out the animals into colour groups – with 6 different colours we were able to separate into 6 piles first and then mix up again and as there are also 6 different animals we them sorted by different animals.
Patterning and sequencing is one of the areas that continues to develop throughout primary and secondary maths so setting up the start of a pattern with the jungle animals as seen above either via colours or via animals J used the tongs to move the animals into the sequence.
The learning resources fine motor and maths tool above can be found on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk (the links following are affiliate links and will cost you no more but a small portion of the cost comes to us and helps keep Rainy Day Mum running smoothly). Whether you have a toddler, preschooler or a child entering school these would be ideal for helping with homework over the coming years and working on fine motor skills at home in hands on play.
Cerys Parker
Cerys is a marine biologist, environmental educator, teacher, mum, and home educator from the UK. She loves getting creative, whether it is with simple and easy crafts and ideas, activities to make learning fun, or delicious recipes that you and your kids can cook together you'll find them all shared here on Rainy Day Mum.