As a teacher, I know that fine motor skills are so incredibly important for school readiness. Our son Elliot is off to Prep next year so we’ve been trying to include more opportunities for him to develop is fine motor skills throughout his day. And one of the best ways to do this? Through play of course!
You can imagine my excitement when I came across Play Like Coco and their fine motor packs! Paula, the founder, is a parent and educator much like me and she has very thoughtfully curated two incredible fine motor packs to help support the development of your little learner AND get them ready for school! In our sponsored blog post today, I’m going to introduce you to these fine motor packs. Make sure you read to the end of the blog for an exclusive coupon code!!
We know that fine motor skills are important for our little learners. The small muscles in their fingers and hands are what help our little people be independent in everyday tasks like tying shoelaces, opening drink bottles, doing up buttons and using a knife and fork. There are so many wonderful ways we can support our children’s fine motor skill development, but I love doing this through play!
The Play Like Coco fine motor kits are so carefully curated to support your little learner in developing fine motor skills in a beautifully open-ended way. Paula includes activity prompts in each kit, but the resources and manipulatives are so open-ended that children just can’t wait to dive in and play and explore without your guidance as well! If you’re not too sure, you can use these activity prompts to guide you or leave it up to your little learners to explore however they like!
When I pulled out the first Fine Motor Skills Kit, Elliot loved exploring the linking chains. He remembered these from Kindy and couldn’t wait to show me how they worked. He carefully linked matching colours together and then sorted them into the bowls that came with the kit as well. This kit in particular has such a wonderful range of items that can be used for colour sorting, attribute sorting and more. These materials lay a solid foundation for future learning around addition and subtraction!
It was so interesting watching him engage with this kit – at one point, he started making houses for the farm animal counters. He stacked the dominoes to make tall towers and then we challenged one another to see who could build a tall tower the fastest!
As I was taking photos of the kits for this blog post, Elliot sat beside me and instantly started sorting the pom poms and shells in the newest Fine Motor Fun Kit. I didn’t give him any input in this – he started exploring all by himself. Little did he know, he was working those little muscles in his hands as he used his pincer grip to pick up the pom poms and transfer them to the matching shells!
The newest Fine Motor Fun Kit includes a Write and Wipe sleeve and printables that can be used alongside the manipulatives included in the pack. Elliot loved choosing a sheet and then did them upside down to show me how clever he was.
It was so lovely being able to sit with him one-on-one and talk about what he was doing. We counted the spots on the fish and he matched pom poms to the circles once he finished tracing. This pack includes 21 printed activity sheets to be used inside the Write and Wipe sleeve – these activities are designed to support fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, concentration, maths and literacy skills, writing skills and more!
We especially loved the addition of the fine motor tools in the Fine Motor Fun Kit. The handy scoopers are such a great introduction to scissor skills for preschoolers. Elliot loved using them to transfer the pom poms onto his buttons for another colour matching activity – totally child-led! We also used the tongs for transferring activities.
He lined the buttons up along the edge of the table when he was done and used the tongs to pick up the buttons and place them back into the container. It was amazing watching him explore the kit with absolutely no input from me though we can certainly extend his skills using the instructions Paula includes too!!
Once we were finished playing, he very excitedly found a special spot for them in his room. He enjoyed the kits so much that he doesn’t want to share them with his little sister and proudly exclaimed “These are for me to learn for big school!”
The Play Like Coco fine motor kits are an incredible way to build your collection of manipulatives without spending a fortune on class sets of things like attribute bears, linking chains, threading buttons and beads and attribute shells. Want to know the best part? Play Like Coco have put together an exclusive code so you can save 10% across their entire store – and there is such a variety of toys, materials and other kits on their website! Just enter the code CASEY10 in the checkout!
If you grab a fine motor kit or anything else from the store, be sure to tag me @littlelifelonglearners and Paula @playlikecoco so we can see what you get up to!
I am so incredibly excited to be working with Play Like Coco to bring you this sponsored blog post. Monetary compensation and product was gifted, though all opinions are my own.