Baby Explorers #2: Fine Motor Activities!

I have been sharing the activities that I did as part of my “Baby Explorers” series in March. See the first baby explorers post for more information on these sessions!

I started our second session with our hello song and a read-along board book, and then we spent the rest of the time letting the babies explore the different activities I set out, all designed to help develop fine motor skills. We ended with bubbles from the bubble machine for the last five minutes.

room set up for baby explorers: blocks, basket with pipe cleaners, pompoms in muffin tin with plastic tongs, ribbon tug box, board books, scarves in kleenex box

The room set up: lots of different things to play with!

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This activity was a major hit! I just emptied a new kleenex box and filled it with play scarves. Babies LOVED taking all of them out, and then we just stuffed them back in and they started again.

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These giant pompoms, purchased from Discount School Supply, have been useful for so many activities! I put out the plastic gator tweezers too, in case we had some older toddlers/preschoolers come, but most of the babies were too young to use them. Still, they loved picking up and sorting the pompoms!

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I’ve seen this activity with colanders before, but I just used a bin that we had already at the library. I love seeing the looks of concentration on toddlers’ faces when they are trying to put the pipe cleaners into the holes! I’ve set this up a couple of times, and it’s most successful if you start with a few pipe cleaners threaded through so that they see how it works.

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The tugging box! This was the other breakout hit – I got the idea from Laughing Kids Learn via Pinterest. I had an ugly box that I didn’t want to paint, so I chose to wrap it in paper first, and then just cut the holes with a box cutter. I left the bottom open to pull the ribbon through, and closed it up when I was done. A few parents asked me how to make this one at home – their children were so intrigued when they pulled one ribbon and the other side moved!

I loved sharing these activities and explaining how they were beneficial, because they were so easy to make with things that were already on hand!

 

3 Comments

  1. Just wanted to send a big THANKS! your way — I hosted a program inspired by your Baby Explorer posts, and it was a big success. I had about 45 babies + their caregivers in attendance! This was twice the amount I was expecting, but thankfully there were plenty of toys and activities to go around. We also have a regular Baby and Me storytime that is well attended, but what I loved about this program was that I got more time to interact with the little ones and their grown ups. In a regular class, I only have time to say hello to them and then a 5-10 minute playtime at the end. But this program lasted an hour, and it was great community building! Thanks for sharing, looking forward to your other posts 🙂

    • Thanks Amanda! I am so glad that the posts inspired you and that your program was a success! And you’ve inspired me to finally write up some more posts – kind of a blogging lull this summer!

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