Today we made our "Little Critters" to live in our Pasta Shell Houses. My daughter has been asking me about doing these ever since we made the little "houses" so we finally got around to doing it.

This seemingly simple little activity really tests your child's fine motor skills and it ended up being a bit more challenging for my (recently turned) 3 year old than I had first imagined. For tips on how to simplify this activity for your child, please see the "Some tips" section below the pictures.



 To make our critters we used pom poms, pipe cleaners, mini googly eyes and glue

 The first fun job was to choose the colours for our critters body and then choose which coloured pipe-cleaners to use for the arms. Use this time to teach or reinforce colour knowledge. Maddie was very insistent on most of the critters having "matching" bodies and arms.

 Here comes the tricky part. Holding down the pom pom to wrap the pipe cleaner around the middle

 Carefully pull the pipe cleaner so that it's tight around the middle of the pom pom.

I then trimmed the arms to the desired length.

 Glue two little dots for the eyes

 Then stick on the eyes

Our little critter family with their pasta shell houses

Some tips:

-To simplify this activity you may need to put the arms on yourself and just let your child do the colour choosing and gluing the eyes on. Just using their pincer grip to pick up the tiny googly eyes can be quite challenging, not to mention the coordination required to hold the little critter while sticking them on.

- Extend this activity by letting your child do the trimming of the pipe cleaners themselves

- Demonstrating the easiest way to wrap the pipe cleaner around the pom pom first might save some frustrations. As might lending a helping hand here and there.

- Use this activity for counting practice and colour matching if you like.

- Make a play scene (playing environment) for your critters and their houses. Use this for imaginative play.

Happy playing,

Debs :)

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A simple little activity to practice fine-motor skills, patience and concentration.

Children love using soft, colourful, fuzzy or sparkly things and pom-poms are a fabulous material that you can use for SO many different activities.

 Using this basket, we discover that pushing the pom-poms just half way through the holes keeps them in place. Push too hard and they pop all the way through. Pushing them in just half way required concentration and patience.

Once all the pom-poms were in the holes, it was time to push them back through and into the basket to start again.

Some tips:

- As it's very unlikely you will have this type of basket at your house, have a look around (or get your child on the job!) and see if you can find something with holes that pom-poms can be pushed into.

- If you can't find anything suitable, punch holes (just large enough to just fit the pom-poms) in a washed out milk carton or cereal box etc.

- This little simple activity requires patience and concentration, something that most children would benefit from working on

- To extend this activity, focus on various patterns that you could make with the pom-poms in the holes

Debs :)

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