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Fine motor skills are an essential part of a toddler’s development. They establish hand-eye coordination, build small muscle control, and lay the foundation for handwriting in the future (among many other things).
With any skill, as they say, practice makes perfect and helping your child practice their fine motor skills is super simple. It can even be entertaining!
Toddlers learn best through playing, interacting, and engaging with the world around them and as anyone with a 2 year old can tell you, are much more likely to cooperate for an activity if you can make it fun.
Even then, their attention spans are still somewhat short at this age. So why not kill two birds with one stone? Combine two activities into one and work on learning colors while giving those little hands a workout.
Creating a fine motor color matching wheel is so easy and does just that!
So here you go! A super simple tutorial that will take you less than an hour (seriously, the longest part of this is waiting for the paint to dry) and will provide hours of educational fun for your little one!
Let’s get started!
You will need:
A piece of cardboard
Paint and a paintbrush
Cut a large circle from your piece of cardboard and use a pen or pencil to divide it into 6 parts (or however many colors you would like to include).
Use your paints to color in the parts.
Paint your clothespins in colors that match your color wheel.
Wait for everything to dry.
And wash the paint off your toddler because he decided they were dry enough for him :)
There you have it! You’re all done :)
Now let your toddler have at it!
You might have to show them the first time or two how to properly use the clothespins. We learned the hard way that if you hold them the wrong way and squeeze, they pop out of your hand and fly across the room.
Of course, your toddler may find that hilarious like mine did and you’ll spend the next 20 minutes picking up flying clothespins.
Eventually though, your hard work will pay off and those fine motor skills will get one heck of a workout.
And since Nicholas no longer refers to every single color as green, I’d say adding the colors was a success :)
Any plans to make a fine motor color matching wheel of your own? What fine motor activities has your child loved?