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This fine Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills Activity for Toddlers is an easy way for young children to practice hand-eye coordination and learn through play.
Learning through play is important. And not just that…but allowing your child to use their senses and fine motor skills to learn is quite amazing.
In our house, we choose to let our children learn using their minds, hands, and senses.
The outcome? They develop a very deep understanding of how their emotions, thoughts, and actions can help them learn and grow.
This Colander Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills Activity for Toddlers is actually a really great fine motor activity for kidsbecause it’s literally them using their hands and minds to make this activity work. That’s it. There’s honestly nothing fancy to it.
But even knowing that, it’s still one of my favorite fine motor activities there is for toddlers to do.
I hope that your child loves the simplicity and challenges of this fun and creative activity.
What is the importance of children learning fine motor skills?
Honestly, they’re extremely important. We live in a world where there are changes, noises, and activities all around us…and the sooner that we can teach our children that they can learn using their hands and minds together, the better off they’ll be in the understanding, exploring, and enjoying the world.
Fine motor skills are used so frequently by children and adults that we don’t often even realize that we’re using them until we stop and think about it a bit more.
What skillsets does this Colander Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills Activity for Toddlers highlight?
What I really do like about this toddler activity is that it highlights a lot of important aspects.
First, it teaches toddlers how to be patient and think about how they can succeed. While this activity might look overly easy and simple, it does take a bit of planning and consistent thought process for them to succeed.
And lastly, it teaches them how to guide and use their hands and fingers so that they can grasp the pipe cleaners effectively and efficiently. While this might not sound overly difficult to you, it can be quite challenging for small toddler hands!
With an open container like a colander, a toddler is very smart in thinking what happens next. As you can see in the video, mine immediately places all the pipe cleaners back in!
How to set up this Colander Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills Activity for Toddlers
I’ve mentioned this a time or two throughout this post, but this toddler activity is really quite simple to do. All you need to do is gather up a few simple supplies and your toddler will be learning and having fun in literally no time at all.
However there IS one simple trick we use to keep a toddler engaged with this fine motor skills. Can you view the video and guess what it is? It can be imperceivable to the eye but it’s there. If you want to know right away, we used clear packing tape to hold down the colander in one place! We used this in our craft stick fine motor activity and have found that taping down objects keeps toddlers focused on what’s in front of them.
What happens when we don’t tape the colander, we’ve tried it and trust us, this is what typically happens. Said toddler runs off with colander and flings it every place. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with this because that’s what toddlers do. They’re always on the move! But if you want them to focus on an activity, packing tape is your friend.
We use clear packing tape because it looks invisible to the eye, and if it was colored, trust me, your toddler would be more focused on peeling off that tape 🙂
Colander Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills Activity for Toddlers – Materials:
- Colander (obviously one with big enough holes to thread pipe cleaners)
- Pipe cleaners, all various colors
- Clear packing tape
**Always supervise baby and toddler activities
COLANDER PIPE CLEANER FINE MOTOR SKILLS ACTIVITY FOR TODDLERS
Materials
Instructions
- Thread pipe cleaners through the colander holes one by one. You can weave in and out of holes.
- Tape your colander on a flat surface like a table or high chair top so your child can concentrate.
- Encourage your child to pull out pipe cleaners one by one.
If you love this fun Colander Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills Activity for Toddlers, make certain to check out these other learning activities as well:
Kitchen Whisk Pom Pom Fine Motor Skills Activity
Cup and Straw Fine Motor Activity
Touch and Feel Sensory Dinosaur Cards
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Agnes Hsu is a mom of three and has been inspiring parents and kids to get creative with easy activities and family friendly recipes for over 10 years. She shares her love for creative play and kids food to her 2MM+ followers online. Agnes' commitment to playful learning and kindness has not only raised funds for charity but also earned features in prestigious nationwide publications.