Our preschooler has great gross motor skills. She can ride her bike ride, swim, play sports, and do gymnastics. These are all things she loves and asks to do often. Getting her to sit down and work on fine motor skills is not as easy.
She loved cutting the yarn to make the Yarn Heart we made a few months ago, so I pulled the yarn out again. Since we are going into fall we made an apple craft.
Fine motor skills are those muscles in your hands that will later help with holding a pencil and writing. Cutting with scissors, ripping paper, and playing with playdough are all great ways for preschoolers to work on building those small muscles in their hands.
The yarn cutting in this apple craft works on fine motor skills.
Supplies
- Paper plate
- Yarn (red or green)
- Scissors
- Green & brown paper (construction or cardstock)
- Glue
*We used clear school glue. You could also use a gluestick. Squeezing the bottle of glue also helps built those muscles in their hands.
Directions
The directions for this apple craft are really easy. Besides getting the supplies out, it requires no prep ahead of time.
1. Cut pieces of yarn. This is open ended. Kids may cut long pieces and pile it on like our preschooler did or cut tiny pieces or something in between.
2. Glue the cut pieces of yarn onto the paper plate until the plate is covered.
3. Cut a stem from the brown paper and a leaf from the green paper and glue to the front of the apple craft.
Yarn is not the easiest thing for young kids to cut. Our daughter is an older preschooler and has been using scissors and cutting for awhile. It’s always good to let kids try. If they have trouble cutting the yarn, they could tear pieces red or green paper and glue that to the paper plate in the place of the yarn.
Written by About a Mom contributor, Kim. Kim, the mama behind The Resourceful Mama, is a medical social worker turned stay at home mom to three. She enjoys sharing simple crafts and activities, parenting and homemaking tips, and a lot of holiday fun.
I like this – would be fun to do with the grand kids.
thank you
This is a super cute idea for the young kids and one we have to try thanks for sharing this one.