Everyone has those days where you just need to pull an activity out of your bag that is simple and requires no extra preparation. I have quite a few of those types of activities lurking at the bottom of my bag, and a favorite is the alphabet search. It combines visual scanning, fine motor skill, and hand strength all in one simple task.
I use alphabet beads and pom poms scattered together on the table to create a visually distracting field. The kids need to find an alphabet letter that I tell them to find, pick it up with the tongs or chopsticks, and feed it to the Munchy Ball. They can then pick up a pom pom and put it in a separate container. This makes them discriminate what they are picking up, cross to different sides of their body for different containers, squeeze Munchy Ball to open his mouth and place the letter in with the tongs.
Once the letter beads are in Munchy Ball’s mouth, we can take them out to write with them. Depending on the writing skill that needs to be worked on, we can either write letters, write words that starts with one of the letters, or create some words using the letters. We can also combine our words to make sentences.
A lot of skills can be worked on using the most basic simple tools, and the task can be modified to suit many abilities. Munchy Ball makes almost any activity a little bit more fun.