I love setting up invitations to play for Little Miss. She loves when I give her something new to play with. In honor of Thanksgiving, I picked up some feathers and set up a fine motor invitation to play center for her. This entertained her for a good hour several different days and she still requests to play with it.
When she came to her table, this was what was set up for her. This simple set up does not show her how to play, but rather gives her the invitation to play with them in whatever way she wanted.
She had never seen or touched feathers before so before she began messing with the colander she played around with the feathers and explored them. Then she soon started exploring them with the colander. Her first reaction when she couldn’t stick the feathers right in was to flip the colander over and start putting all the feathers inside. I allowed her to explore in her own way for quite a while. I then stepped in and asked her if she would like me to play too. She immediately handed me a feather and I showed her how to stick the feathers in the holes. The only problem was, the red colander in the picture above actually had holes that were too small for the feathers we had especially for someone who is still working on those fine motor skills. So we bought out the green one instead and then little miss went to town sticking the feathers in.
She loved sticking them in the holes and after she had several in the colander she loved pulling them back out. Because a couple of the feathers had bigger stems it was harder for her to just pull them out. She quickly became frustrated. This is where I stepped in and helped teach her that she needed to use one hand to hold the colander while she pulled the feathers with the other one. She didn’t want to do this at first, but after she realized that holding the colander helped her she was all over holding it down.
She loved playing with this activity and beyond the fine motor practice, she learned and practiced many other valuable skills while playing. Win Win for this teacher mama.
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