feed the monkey

Last week, Logan's preschool teacher told me he's struggling with his fine motor skills a bit....writing, cutting, etc.   He needs to get lot of practice in this area to be more ready for kindergarten.   As a very active little boy, he isn't always really interested in lots of coloring or drawing.  Once in a while, but its not his 'go to' activity.

So as I usually do in these situations, I reached out to mommy friends for some ideas on ways to get him to exercise his fine motor skills without realizing we're making him do work.   I got a great list of homemade ideas to get us started.  I had him sorting dry beans by color with my eyebrow tweezers in no time.  Here are some other good, easy things to do at home to work the fine motor skills:

* Cut confetti out of colored paper or even the Val Pak inserts.  
* Sort the soft puff balls from a craft store into jars by colors or sizes.

* Fill a bowl with soft fuzzy craft balls, or marshmallows, etc.  Have him transfer into another bowl using kitchen tongs.
* Sort Skittles before they eats them.  Hmmmm, I could probably apply this to half of the upcoming Halloween loot.  And maybe while I'm at it, I'll get the boys to graph their candy booty too.

* Buy the bag of 15 bean soup dried bean mix and give them lots of little bowls to sort them into.

* Beans in a pan (you will need a 9x13 pan, spoon, a wide mouth funnel, beans or rice, jar).  Pour beans or rice into pan and then using spoon or fingers transfer them into the jar via the funnel. Hours of fun! Well, at least 15 minutes in Logan's case.

* Having them string colored Cheerios onto yarn in patterns.
* Cutting food with a butter knife, especially things like apples, celery, etc. 

My teacher-y friends also told me about some great websites with tons of educational games and resources.  I was tickled to learn the fabulous Lakeshore Learning company has a store in Alexandria, about 40 minutes from us.   I browsed my way thru the store yesterday, drooling over all the selections for math, science, language and tons of other goodies.  Will have to go back for some holiday shopping for the kids for sure.   But while I was there, I picked this up...

He loves it, and its a great fine motor skills game.  Dylan got this cool puzzle game by another company I love, Think Fun.  They also make Rush Hour Jr, which was a big Christmas gift hit here last year for Dylan.