By using tongs a child can strengthen their fine motor skills and hand/eye co-ordination.
Materials Needed:
- Kitchen tongs.
- Tweezers.
- Variety of small objects (cereal, chopped up vegetables, cut fruit, sugar cubes, cotton balls, cooked peas, corks etc.).
- Empty egg carton/small containers.
What to do:
- Choose a variety of small objects and lay them out onto a tray.
- Demonstrate to your child, how to use the tongs/tweezers to pick up each of the objects and move them into the egg carton.
- Give your child some tongs and encourage your child to pick up the objects while using them.
- Your child will begin to experiment how to grasp, squeeze and move objects from one egg carton to another.
Hints and Tips:
- Begin this activity with kitchen tongs and then move onto the tweezers.
- Once your child is able to do this you can add little variations such as having a race or counting how many objects can be moved before one is dropped.
- Put the objects in a bowl of water and encourage your child to pick up the objects with kitchen tongs from the water.
- Transfer water from a bowl to a cup using an eye dropper.
- Chopsticks can be used to pick up objects as well.