Homeschooling: Fine Motor Skills

Poor Emma.  

She is such a great student and I could give her any boring activity and she would do it.  And do it really well.  

And then there's Calvin.  

 I have to constantly change things up in order to keep him interested in school.  While it is hard it is also very fulfilling to see him thrive when it works.  

Some of the things we are really working on is fine motor skills.  

Holey-Moley, this kid is so shaky when he writes!  So I've been trying to strengthen those old hand muscles; hopefully that will make it easier for him to write and understand where the pencil needs to be in relation to the paper.  

Here is one of the things we've done.  Putting pipe cleaners (or Chenille stems as my grandma called them) into our strainer (or sieve as my grandma calls it).  One of the things that the photos don't show is the fact that he had these pipe cleaners so jumbled up that he had to practice fine motor just to get them in a state that they could be fed through the little holes.  

 Here's one happy boy with his project.  We did this project in Mid September and he made me keep this upstairs in the homeschool room for weeks!  He wanted to keep it as a hat :)  The keeping of the strainer hat made for some interesting noodle-draining.

 Here is one of my favorite things for Cal...strip puzzles.  Not like strip poker, perv-o!  Just kidding.  These puzzles are you can see are a picture cut into strips with numbers on the bottom.

Kiddos can put them together by arranging the numbers numerically or by putting the picture together like a normal puzzle.  Either way they seem to like it a lot.  I get things like this at this wonderful website called, Homeschool Creations.   Be sure to check out her website even if you are not homeschooling.  These activities are wonderful and we take them everywhere...restaurants, ballet while waiting on Emma, and other places.  They help Cal to learn while not really "learning" if you know what I mean.

So those are a couple of things that we've been doing for fine motor.  We do other things too.  What do you do for fine motor practice?  I'd love to hear your recommendations!