A fine motor favorite that goes for miles!

I can’t take credit for this activity as I got the idea while visiting Forest Hill Playschool.  The teacher in the class used Cheerios to place on the skewers, which is an excellent activity for working on pincer skills, as well as eye-hand coordination.  I always worry about allergies and wanted to be able to use it with a number of children, so I substituted the cereal pieces for plastic rings.  To make it more difficult, we added paperclips. The paperclips worked nicely, because my wooden sticks weren’t exactly skewers, but were more like tall, skinny Popsicle sticks.  Therefore, the children had to turn the paperclips just so, to get them to fit the end of the stick. The funniest thing was how long the children attended to this activity.  Once they finished a stick with one color of clay on the bottom, they wanted to try another one with a different colored ball of clay at the bottom. 

Michelle Yoder, OTR/L