Funky Fingers Station
I have an independent fine motor skills/Funky Fingers station in my classroom. The children use it during golden time, Aistear time (if they choose to), during wet play and as an early finisher activity. I change the activity each week and try to link it to my SESE topic where possible. The activities are all activities that are designed to improve and strengthen children’s fine motor/dexterity skills, key in the infant age group in order to foster skills such as handwriting. Here are a few ideas or you can download a complete set of 38 Funky Finger Station ideas, enough to cover a whole year. You will see from the following examples that most activities are easy to put together and don’t require a lot of resources!
1. Tap Tap Art.
The kids love tap tap art. It’s always a classroom favourite, but it can be a challenge to keep track of the pins!
2. Threading.
Threading hollow objects onto skewers. For this activity, I have used beads, cereal such as cheerios and pasta shapes.
3. Marble Run.
Marble run is not only great for exercising fine motor skills but also for problem solving skills.
4. Threading beads.
Similar to number 2, threading beads is always an easy one to do! The children love making necklaces for the teachers. Just remember to take them off before you leave school!
5. Colour Sorting.
Sorting items by colour using a tweezers. In this example I have used coloured matchsticks but you could also use other resources such as pom-poms or beads.
6. Push Pin Pictures.
In this activity the children followed the line of the simple pictures with push pins. The activity was completed on a small notice board and is easily adapted to any theme.
7. Balancing golf balls on golf tees.
8. Sorting pom-poms by colour.
9. Threading pipe cleaners.
10. Marla & matchstick hedgehogs.
11. Halloween pumpkin faces (from Twinkl).
12. Learning to tie our shoelaces.
13. Making pictures on peg boards.
14. Decorating Christmas trees.
This pack contains a variety of fine motor activities and uses fine motor tools. The activities all use the most common resources in an infant room and require minimal prep to set up.
All of the activities are ideal for setting up a weekly fine motor/funky fingers area in your classroom or can be used for specific fine motor activities for the whole class.
Included are 38 suggested activities, one for each week of the school year. Calendar and seasonal events such as Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Saint Patrick’s day and Summer theme activities are incorporated and each activity comes with teacher notes/suggestions on how to implement the activity and a poster page that you may wish to print to display at your activity. Some activities come with some printable templates that you can print for your activity and for others the links of where to source or download materials are provided.
Each poster page is labelled according to the month and week that the activity is designed for, however, this is only a guideline and you can engage with each activity as you wish.
Also included in the yearly bundle is an editable weekly schedule and over view of the activities which you can edit to suit the needs of your class.
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