Fine motor skills: split pin animals

Fine motor skills by stealth as we had to cut these out, punch the holes and attach the paper fasteners (brads?).  We downloaded the ladybird (ladybug) and caterpillar from here at Sparklebox (there are also other minibeasts in the file) and it fitted in with National Wildlife week in the UK (14th-20th March) and our general Spring theme.  The elephant came from the the animals link below.
A was in charge of the elephant since it is his favourite.  He got the chance to use his left-handed scissors to cut out the entire thing himself - something he is still not too confident in doing.  Then we used a sharp pencil and a pad of felt to punch the holes and he put the whole thing together.

R was in charge of the ladybird which was more complicated as it was multi-layered.

B got the simplest one of all the caterpillar.  I cut out the pieces but if you have a little one who is confident with scissors they could cut out the oval body pieces (beats scissor skills sheets!) He spent the rest of the day making all three move, jump, fly and wriggle.

They also have other characters that you can download:
Animals (lion, elephant, horse,tiger, and teddy)
Ocean animals (turtle, jellyfish,mermaid,octopus and shark)
Dinosaurs
Christmas (santa and a snowman
Teddy bear
Pets (cat dog fish and rabbit)

Fine Motor Skills: Button Snake

I have wanted to make one of these ever since I saw one on Counting Coconuts.  Basically it is just a length of ribbon with a button on each end; then you cut out some felt shapes with a slit in them so they can be "buttoned" onto the ribbon.  Great for fine motor skills and of course for getting used to using buttons. 

The one thing that put me off is that I didn't have felt in my stash and if I went out and bought enough sheets to make it nice and colourful this little thing was going to cost as much as something like this.

 Well, this week I was lucky enough to find a bag of mixed felt offcuts in a local craft shop I have been meaning to visit - perfect for little projects like this one and for ones that R can get her teeth into sewing-wise too.

Both A and B are the intended recipients.  We have had a report from the school that states that A has poor motor skills, largely because his handwriting is not as good as expected.  Not sure about this as I think it is really because he doesn't like writing and will do everything in his power to avoid it and so has little practise.  Plus the fact that both OH and I have terrible handwriting ourselves!  Anyway A has been "trying out" stuff for B for me before it gets given to B.

A thought the snake was a good thing to do (and as expected too easy for him!) B has yet to be persuaded to give it a go.

If you want to make your own then you can make your own shapes to fit in with any theme you happen to be following at the time.  Our shapes were leaves, largley because we are doing Spring related tasks at the moment; also because this week was National Tree Week in the UK.

Letter S: s is for sun: Alphabet file Folder Game

Alphabet matching game to go with our "s is for sun" theme (although it could also be used for a weather theme).

The sun alphabet was downloaded free from Sparklebox.(click here to download) - the letters in the set are A4 sized but we scaled them to print out four to a page.

Having cut out the first set of letters A and R volunteered to glue them into the file folder. (we used two folders stuck together to make sure there was enough space)

The second set of lowercase letters was laminated to allow one to one matching.  B can pretty much do this on the pattern alone but it gives us a chance to name each of the letters as he finds the match.  The game can be taken to the next level by making it a lowercase to uppercase matching game using the complementary uppercase letters from here.

B was so keen to play this he grabbed each letter as I cut it from the laminate, all(!) we need now is to get him to realise that the letters have unique names.

Letter C: c is for Cat: Magnet Page

Download the magnet page pdf from here

For use with round magnets, coins, counters, buttons, stickers,bottle caps, bingo dabbers etc etc etc...

Letter G: G is for Gruffalo: Build Your Own Gruffalo Board Game for Download

Board games.  Depending on your point of view they are either:
1) Good for teaching children to take turns, count, persevere and move towards a given goal, be good winners or losers and spend time interacting with others (who knows, maybe even including you!)
or
2)Brain numbingly boring for adults and something to be avoided unless under pain of death.
I'm definitely a 1 person, my OH is a 2 person - sometimes I wonder how we ever got together in the first place.  If you are also a pro board game person you may like this game for download based on the Gruffalo character created by Julia Donaldson.

It has been produced by a Special Needs teacher called Bev Evans and is hosted here on her website Communication4All which specialises in inclusive learning materials (it is also on the TES website should you have trouble downloading the pdf - you will need to be registered to download the file but it is free).
The idea of the game is that you throw a die and move around the game board (with the green squares). As you land on a numbered square you collect that piece of your gruffalo.  First person to collect all the pieces of their gruffalo wins.
This is the first time B has really come across a board game.  One reason is that A is a lousy loser and takes it as a personal attack when he doesn't win, that kind of thing will tend to make you find another activity.  Another reason is that it is difficult to find something that is universally appealing and doesn't require any skill so it can be used by a wide age range. This game appealed to all the kids - even R. We doctored a building brick so it became a die with numbers instead of spots and B sat on my lap but I have to say he didn't really get it.  He kept trying to grab the board, the coloured pieces, the counters, the die and in the end (because we persevered and kept playing) got bored and went and found something else to do.  R and A played it several times for the rest of the day.  Meanwhile B used the spare game pieces as a puzzle and made his own gruffalo several times so not a dead loss.
The only change I would make to the game is the game board.  In the original file it is A3 but since I have a standard printer it came out A4 and things were a bit cramped.  Also, we had to go round the board several times in order to collect the elusive final pieces; so I plan to remake the board as a circle instead of  a line.  Overall, a really good appealing resource and one that we will be using again.

letter e: e is for egg: Easter Egg Matching Activities - our homemade version

After writing Muck Monsters: letter e: e is for egg: Easter Egg Matching Activities for download we had a change of heart.  Instead of using our printer ink we decided to make our own easter Eggs.  

First a plastic lid was cut to shape and then we used this template to draw around to produce our eggs.  

Then we coloured them in - a group effort which all the children helped in- each one is unique to make the puzzle a little easier for B.

A helped me laminate the eggs.

R cut them out and A cut them in half.

Here is the finished result.

B enjoyed cracking the eggs (complete with sound effects) and then putting them back together!

letter e: e is for egg: Easter Egg Matching Activities for download

Looking forward to Easter this is a free download from the people over at Sparklebox to match upper and lower case letters.

I would save this one for older kids as although there are a couple of egg backgrounds they are reused for multiple letters and so not unique.

Another free download this time for numbers rather than letters is from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  (lots of activities on this page - the Easter Number match is about halfway down)

We tried this one last year but it was counting so B would have none of it!  This year at the grand old age of three we will try again but i won't hold my breath. Again the backgrounds are not unique so the very littlest ones may struggle.