GENERAL ACTIVITIES

• Bell Game

Find a bell with a long handle. Sitting in a circle, the bell is passed around to each person, using a pincer grip on the handle, without letting the bell ring or make any noises. If the bell rings, it returns to the start and begins again. Excellent game for concentration too. Add an element of fun by using an hourglass timer to keep the other children focused while they are waiting for the bell to come to them. I came up with this activity one day when everyone kept messing around with my 'attention' bell and the noise was getting out of hand and I needed a break :) It worked wonderfully.

EARLY CHILDHOOD ACTIVITIES

• Fine Motor Groups

Every morning in my Prep classroom, we have Fine Motor Groups. The class is separated into five equal groups and there are 5 different boxes with fine motor activities, so that each group does one activity each morning during the week. The activities last about 20 minutes and I explained to them that fine motor activities are exercises for our hands and fingers and we brainstormed some ideas for why we need strong hands and fingers and they had lots of ideas - like writing, opening bottles and doors, typing on a computer etc.

• Dot Paintings

Working in partners, with a large piece of blank paper, choose two paint colours. Dip one index finger in one colour and the other index finger in the other colour and cover as much of the paper as possible with dots.

To make the task a bit more challenging, introduce two new colours but use other fingers (the ring fingers are a bit trickier). The challenge in this activity is to avoid the colours being mixed up by using just the two fingers allowed.

The finished painting can be used for background display paper, wrapping paper, pasting black cardboard silhouettes or to draw other pictures over the top of the painted dots. They look fantastic.

• Threading

There are lots of different things that you can thread:
-Spaghetti is fun and cheap and looks great when dyed
- Cut straws up into inch long pieced and thread wool through the pieces to make a patterned necklace.
- Cotton spools and shoe laces.
- Glass beads.
- Wooden beads.
- Drill small holes in the end of cuisenaire rods and make a threaded pattern with different length rods going from shortest to longest.

• Tweezers and Chopsticks

Find some larger plastic tweezers or use chopsticks to make it trickier, and use them to pick up all sorts of objects (such as beads, packing foam peanuts). Practise transferring the beads from one plate to another plate and try to fill an entire plate without using your hands to help - just the tweezers or chopsticks.

MIDDLE-UPPER PRIMARY ACTIVITIES

• Finger Print Creatures

Using a stamp/inking pad, make fingerprint and thumbprints onto small pieces of cardboard. Using pencils or markers add features to turn the fingerprints into different characters - monsters and animals are favourites.

You might like to use this activity as the basis for developing characters for a story the children could write for younger children.

SECONDARY ACTIVITIES