Sewing

Today we offered the children an experience with sewing meant to strengthen children's fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and perseverance. We used plastic needles, yarn, and a special fabric made with holes that could help the children practise using their needles. 

The children were so interested in this center and most attempted this experience. Some children spent their entire playtime exploring these materials. 

This activity required lots of patience. The children had to cut their length of yarn the proper length, thread the yarn into the needle, and carefully see their designs. 

This is excellent fine motor practice, which will help strengthen little fingers and help prepare them for future writing and drawing experiences. 

What beautifully seen pieces of art!

The next step was to offer children additional interesting materials to sew - plastic lacing string, ribbon, and other textured yarn. 

Nuts and Bolts

The children investigated various sizes of nuts and bolts today. Manipulating such small objects is great for strengthening fine motor control and hand-eye coordination. 

"I am trying to figure out which one fits."

"I'm putting these together and sorting them. These ones are big and these ones are small."

Candy Cane Inspired Painting

Our children love to paint with marbles. We put out red and white paint today and encouraged them to create candy cane inspired art! It was so much fun and great hand-eye coordination practice as the children had to work hard to keep the marbles in the tray when rolling them around.

Manipulating Catapults

Mini catapults made of clothespins and a wood block are one of our favourite inventions! We introduced them early last year, so our current SKs are quite skilled at manipulating them. We put them out at the science and math area last week in hopes they would pique our JK's interests as well.

It was really interesting to watch the children experiment with how to best manipulate the catapults. In the following video you can see the teamwork involved as the children work together to stabilize the catapult.

Once the skill of how to use them is mastered, many children work on their control and technique. Aiming the chips into bowls was a favourite activity and great for strengthening fine motor control and hand-eye coordination. 

Our goal is to encourage the children to assign points for getting chips in the bowls. This will add a math element to an already very exciting activity!

Spray Painting

We did such an interesting activity outside with the children today! After clothespinning some white paper on the fence, we encouraged the children to spray paint onto the paper using pump bottles. Each bottle contained half water and half paint in order to make the liquid thin enough to go through the pump, and also so that the colours would drip and blend together easily on the paper. 

It was such a wonderful sight to see the children working side by side - sharing and problem-solving how to best manipulate the very tough-to-use bottles.

The children were amazed at how the colours blended together to make new ones and were excited to find the spray left a circular pattern on the paper.

Those spray bottles were tough work for little fingers! Our children got a work out doing this - helping to strengthen their fine motor skills and commitment to an activity.

Once inside we put the spray bottles at our art easels and invited the children to continue exploring. We thought the goggles were a nice touch! (Some of the children realized quickly that they had to have the bottles pointed the right way before squeezing the trigger!)

What was especially interesting for us to observe today was how the children problem solved when the tip of the trigger became stuck after too much rapid pressing. After much discussion they figured out that they had to pull it upwards until it clicked and then it would be ready to use again.

What a great way to engage  both boys and girls in creative art-making!

Chick Pea Structures

We soaked dried chick peas overnight in water to make them soft.

Then we invited children to use toothpicks with the chick peas to create interesting three-dimensional structures.

It was tricky to get the toothpick into the chick pea - but great fine motor practice and hand/eye control.

While we were working we had a great conversation about the differences between 2D and 3D shapes!