“Pumpkin” Drop Fine Motor Practice

I love being able to reuse items around the house for fun learning materials for my little one. In the spirit of fall and my ever growing collection of lids and containers and my itch to provide R with age appropriate activities that follow her interests I created the “Pumpkin” Drop fine motor practice activity.

In order to create this activity, I took a clean Cool Whip container and some orange lids (our pumpkins) from Gatorade bottles and cut slots in the cool whip lid to match up with the lids. I made one a little smaller so she had to try a little harder to get the lids to go in. I also made the slots different directions to ensure she had to twist and manipulate her hand and the lids when adding them to the container.

I set the container and lids up on the floor for her and let her explore.

Her first reaction was to take the lid off the Cool Whip container and just start putting the lids in that way. I let her do so until she had all of them in there and she then dumped them back out. This time I showed her what else you could do with them and then watched her go to town. She is at the stage right now that she gets easily frustrated if something doesn’t automatically happen the way she wants it to, but after some reassurance that she really could do it, she was popping the “pumpkins” into her container one after another. I would occasionally twist the container in an opposite directions just to allow her the chance to manipulate the lids a different way.

It was fun to watch her explore and as she practiced the better she got at getting the lids to fit. The smaller hole always made her mad, but she always made it in. If she got too frustrated she immediately problem solved and would take the lid off the container and just stick them in that way. Smart girl. Smart girl :)

It was interesting to see her solve her problems on her own and in her own way. Little does she know she was also practice the very valuable skill of taking a lid off and on. I also made a point to count out the lids as she was putting them in and out of the container. Do I expect her to learn to count at this age? No. But by counting out loud while she does something like this exposes her to numbers within her learning environment and is a great start to learn numbers and one-to-one correspondence.

In order to make this activity more Halloween-ish you could, draw jack-o-lantern faces on the lids. I chose not to do this so that I could reuse the lids for other activities that were non-Halloween specific.

This activity has been accessible to her all week and she has went back to it many times and explored it in many different ways. At the end of playing, I always have her put them all back in the container so they are safely stored and can be used the next time.