Howdy, folks! Here’s a quickie fine motor activity that I created in about five minutes. All you need to make your own are a few simple items and there are lots of variations that you could create depending on what skills you are targeting. And of course, glitter is optional, but I highly recommend it- for no other reason than it’s just plain groovy!
Here’s what I used:
- black plastic coffee can lid (you could always laminate black card stock or poster board as well)
- googly eyes
of various sizes - eight clothespins
- a piece of white yarn
- hot glue gun
- Mod Podge
- silver glitter (provided to us by Craft Project Ideas.com)
To make the body, I used my glue gun to attach the googly eyes to the plastic lid. I poked a hole at the top of the lid with a nail and then threaded my yarn through it to create a hanger (these two steps took me about 2.5 minutes). For the legs, I coated one side of my clothespins in Mod Podge and then sprinkled them with glitter. After drying overnight they were ready to go! If you skip the glitter and leave your clothespins plain, you could literally be ready to go in less than five minutes.
To present the activity, I just arranged the pieces in a basket for the twins to find. I sat with them and helped them figure out the clothespins- they are still quite challenged by them at their stage of fine motor development. This is why I did not add any further matching component to our spider- the pinching alone was a big accomplishment!
Variations:
There are many ways you could make this activity more challenging …
- Add colored stickers to the body and tint the clothespins accordingly to make a color matching game.
- Add letter or number stickers to the body and add corresponding symbols o the clothespins for letter/number recognition.
- Number the clothespins and have the children place them on the spider in numerical order.
Looking for more spider activities? Try these:
This post has been shared at some of these fabulous link parties.
*Thank you to Craft Project Ideas for supplying the silver glitter featured in this post! Click on the text link to visit their website for tons of great craft ideas for your little ones!
What a wonderful fine motor activity! I love the spider’s compound eyes!
What a great activity! I never thought I would ever type “spider” and “cute” in the same sentence! 😉 They are so cute, in fact, that I have a feeling the little ones I nanny will prefer to hold these spiders as their “pets” than use them as part of their Halloween decorations!
I’m so in love with this it is ridiculous! 😀 So cute, as usual from you!
What a fantastic idea and I love how you have used 8 eyes and made the spider look right.
Adorable!! Found it at TGIF Linky
I love all your sparkly spider ideas! This is a great fine motor activity. My boys would enjoy it. I’ll be featuring this on The Sunday Showcase this weekend. Thanks for linking up!