Spring Fine Motor Centers for Kindergarten
By the time spring rolls around, kindergarten students have grown by leaps and bounds in their fine motor skills. You can help them keep those skills sharp as they get ready for the long summer vacation. Check out these Spring Fine Motor Centers for Kindergarten that will keep your students engaged and motivated to improve their hand strength and coordination!
Adding More Fine Motor Practice to Centers
If you’re looking for an easy way to give your students more fine motor practice in the weeks leading up to summer vacation, consider your centers routine! The hands-on activities that you use for centers can help your students practice their hand-eye coordination and strengthen their hand muscles. Here are just a few fine motor tasks and materials that are perfect for your center routine:
- Snap Cubes: Students can create pictures, patterns, and stacks using these colorful manipulatives.
- Clothespins: Clothespins are a great hand-strengthening tool that you can use for self-correcting task card activities.
- Beads: Whether students are stringing letter beads or creating patterns with colored beads, this is a great way for them to practice their pincer grasp. You can also adjust the string that students use in order to increase or decrease the difficulty. For example, pipe cleaners and shoelaces are easier for stringing beads than twine or yarn.
- Play Dough: Students can roll out play dough to use as counters for math centers. They can also mold and shape the play dough to create shapes, letters, or numbers.
- Tweezers: When a center activity requires students to place manipulatives on a task card, add a set of tweezers to increase the fine motor practice!
- Scissors: Cutting practice is another great way to help students improve their fine motor skills. Especially in the spring, when they are more comfortable with using scissors independently.
- Plastic Links: Instead of stacking task cards that match, students can link them together using plastic links.
There are many more small adjustments that you can make to your centers routine in order to add fine motor practice. These are just some of my favorites!
Fine Motor Centers for Spring
With those fine motor tools and activities in mind, I wanted to share some low-prep activity ideas that you can use for your centers routine this spring. Your students will love these hands-on and engaging fine motor centers!
1. Addition Kites
This spring-themed activity uses beads to help students model and solve addition equations. Each kite contains an addition equation and a pipe cleaner “tail” that students will use for bead stringing. They will add one color of beads to model the first number in the equation and another color for the second number.
Once all of the beads have been added to the tail, students can count the total number of beads to find the sum. For additional fine motor and number formation practice, students can write the completed equations on a dry-erase board or paper.
2. Catching Bugs
This fun spring center is a great way to help students practice teen numbers! Each bug catcher task card begins with ten bugs. Students will then find the coordinating task card to see how many additional bugs they need to add to the bug catcher. Once they have added the correct number of manipulatives to the task card, they will complete the addition sentence at the bottom of each card.
You can use any manipulatives that you have on hand for this activity, like pom poms or unit cubes. Mini erasers are also a fun choice, especially if you have some insect erasers on hand already. You can also increase the fine motor difficulty of this task by having students use tweezers to place the manipulatives on each task card.
3. CVC Word Roll and Color
You can also add some fine motor practice to your literacy centers! This roll and color activity is a fun and engaging way for students to practice their pencil grip and coloring skills. Students will take turns rolling a die and then coloring an object on their task card that has the coordinating vowel sound. Students can color on paper copies of the task cards using crayons, colored pencils, or markers. You could also laminate the task cards and have students color the pictures using dry-erase markers of the same colors.
You can easily adjust the activity to practice fine motor skills in a different way. For example, students can use pom poms that match the color code and use the task cards for a roll and cover activity instead. Students can use tweezers to place the pom poms on the task card for even more of a fine motor challenge.
4. Read and Build
Word-building practice can also be more engaging with a fine motor activity! For this fine motor center, students will choose a rainbow card with a word written on it. They will then thread letter beads onto a pipe cleaner to spell the word. There are many different sizes and shapes of letter beads that you can use to adjust the fine motor difficulty of this activity.
These particular task cards are also helpful because they are editable. You can add your own words that correspond to the phonics skills or sight words that you’d like your students to review during centers.
Printable Fine Motor Centers for Kindergarten
Would you like to use some of these fine motor activities in your centers this spring? I have created a bundle of Seasonal Kindergarten Fine Motor Centers that you can use throughout the school year. This bundle includes eleven spring-themed fine motor activities that you can add to your centers rotation. Just click below to find this bundle of fine motor activities in my shop.
Fine Motor Activities Kindergarten Task Cards Boxes
Save These Spring Fine Motor Centers
Be sure to save this post so you can come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite teaching board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to quickly find these fine motor activities when you’re planning out your spring centers.
