Last night Selena found an old word search puzzle book that I have had for a while. She noticed that I had words circled on some of the pages, so she immediately wanted a pen. I told her to get a crayon. We sat down and on each page I chose a random letter for Selena to find and circle.
She worked really hard to find all the letters that I asked her to find. Then she decided to start finding the one’s that she wanted to find. Every time she did she would pronounce the phonetic sound that they made. We must have worked on this for a good half hour.
You might be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with writing?” Think about it, it takes a lot of practice for those little hands to learn how to work within a small limited space to get just one little letter circled. I did the first two on the top of the page to show her, to only circle the letter she found. At first her circles took in 3 to 4 letters, but the more we worked on this exercise the smaller her circles became. She was mastering the fine motor skills and control needed for writing.
This is an excellent idea - thank Selena for me - I think my youngest will really enjoy a letter find, too :)
ReplyDeleteMy grandma used to do this with me all of the time! She loved (and still loves) word searches and she used to tell me to find the letters and I felt so important using her "grown up" games. Later I was excited when I would find words such as "in" or "at" in the puzzles by myself. She was always very good at giving me (and my cousins) "work" to do. I also remember how she always "needed" us to cut strips of paper for her. Aw, I think I'm going to go remind my grandma of this as soon as I can.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great idea, for letter recognition and fine motor skills. Thanks!! I believe we even have a word search book floating around. If not, I think I will go get one tomorrow. Tabitha will love it!
ReplyDeleteI was just glancing through your posts and saw the one from April 26th on counting by twos (yes I am a bit behind in my blog reading what with the baby and all). Anyhow, the way I have talked to the girls about odd and even is the line identical objects up in two rows. We see if everyone has "a friend," if they do, it is even, if not, it is odd. It had been a while since we did this, but I posted about it this week, we had used felts. But we have done it in the past. I think I will try it again this week and add the use of the numerals 2, 4, 6 and 8 to see if I can get her counting by 2.
ReplyDeleteI saw a similar suggestion somewhere else one time, but they were using it mainly for filling up time, so I hadn't thought as much about the fine motor skills.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great activity! A wonderful fine motor practice.
ReplyDeleteYou are right - this activity is great for fine motor skills. The only problem here is that Anna couldn't care less for this kind of fun :)
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