Fine motor skills and number activity

Being on maternity leave, I have so much more time to organise and research activities. Lumpy asked for a "quiet time activity" so I set up a simple peg and pom pom activity to work on her fine motor skills. I thought this would be to simple to just move from one container to the next, so I made it into a math game. I was surprised that she actually had some trouble with the smaller pom poms, The large orange ones were fine - so I limited the number of those she would need to move .

We set out 4 different sized pom poms - one size to a container, mixed colours (except orange was the only colour we have for large). Used silicon bake moulds to transfer the pom pom to. Did a mix of "instructions"

All ready to start

Counting out the number of dots so she can put the right number of pom poms.

If the tongue is out, things are serious! she needed to use 2 hands a few times, often one hand would hold the pom pom while the other worked the peg.

working on her "math" instruction 4 blue + 3 pink = 7 pom poms.

After the number activity, we matched up the pom pom sizes. I will be doing this again, she really got frustrated with this activity when she started struggling to open and close the peg.