Building fine motor skills by hammering

My kids favorite fine motor exercises are the ones that are disguised as playful activities and if the exercise involves hammering things, well you have a winner there!

Materials needed:

a piece of Styrofoam (save those packing pieces)
golf tees
plastic hammer or mallet

building fine motor skills by using hammers to nail golf tees in styrofoam

After I have gathered all the materials, we usually go outside and I let them hammer away! I have found that there will be pieces of Styrofoam that will break away so going outside makes clean up a breeze! They hammer the golf tees into the Styrofoam and then pull them up when they are finished and repeat the process, over, and over, and over again! It's a great way to keep the kids occupied and build their hand strength and coordination at the same time!

Need more activities to keep the kids busy?

Check out our fine motor page for more ideas.

Kindergarten fine motor skills

This week I wanted to share some of the fine motor activities that have been keeping us busy.

We worked on identifying shapes (circle, square, triangle, oval, rectangle, diamond), then we traced shapes and then cut them out.

Build fine motor skills by tracing and cutting shapes

We did one page in our name booklet, and also building our names with cut up toilet paper tubes. Thank you, Imprints from Tricia for the inspiration.

Learn to write your name activity by building your name with toilet roll tubes

We practiced printing our pre-printing basic shapes.

Build fine motor skills by printing pre-printing shapes

We also used our pinching fingers and used our fine motor skills to put fruit loops on shapes.

fine motor activities use fingers to place fruit loops on drawn shapes

Fun learn to write your name printable activity booklet

Today I want to share a little about my best selling teacher resource my Learn to write your name printable activity booklet. One of the first things we do in kindergarten is learn about our names. Kids begin by learning to recognize their name first and then how to spell and write their name. The best way to learn this skill is with daily practice.

I've uploaded my learn to write your name activity booklet to teachers pay teachers and you can find the booklet in my store here.

It includes 20 pages with different printing activities on each page. For example, one of the first pages is rainbow tracing and the kids have to use 3 colors and trace the letters in their name. I like to use this booklet in my kindergarten class every morning. The kids come in to class pick up their booklet and complete one page.

I love having all the practice pages in a booklet form because it makes the prep time so much easier. Once the booklet is made and I've written their names in it I just have to pull it out every morning and let them practice. It's also great for those kiddos who take longer to learn to write their names because I can just copy more pages and add it into their book and use it during small group work time.

Learn to write your name booklet with rainbow writing

**Update: I just updated my booklet to include a fun graphic on each page that can be colored!** So if you have previously purchased the booklet please re download it (for free) to get the newest updated version.

You can read my latest post post about it here.