The development of fine motor skills are an important part of life for young children. Fine motor activities help them to develop the muscles in their hands and help coordinate these movements with their eyes.
These activities go a long way in setting your child up for good academic skills, independent self-care, and helps them develop their attention span.
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The following fine motor activity is a ton of fun for toddlers- and probably preschoolers too! Because what’s more fun than smashing something with a hammer?!
Hammering Fruit Loops for Fine Motor Skill Development
My boys love to use real tools- especially hammers. And they love to destroy things with them. This fine motor activity is perfect for filling this need to destroy, all while helping build hand eye coordination and developing small hand muscles!
For this activity you will need:
Fruit Loops (or other cereal of your choosing)
A small hammer ( a real one!)
A Tray (for containing the mess, these get a lot of use in our house!)
This takes no time to set up- just throw a handful of cereal out on the tray and hand your toddler or preschooler the hammer.
If they’ve never used a real one before you might want to do a brief safety lesson on how to hold it and remind them to keep their fingers out of the way.
Then just let them whack! And smash! And create a big mess!
You’ll probably have to add more cereal a few times.
What’s great about this fine motor activity is that it really helps with coordination. They have to line up the hammer and the piece of cereal in their mind before swinging the hammer.
It also develops muscles in the hands from holding a somewhat heavy hammer and swinging it over and over.
This also doubles as a great sensory activity. Fruit loops engage sense of sight, touch, and smell.
Once my 2 year old was done smashing he recognized that his tray looked a little like a construction zone. The ran to get his dump truck, tractor and snow plow. and spent another long while ‘cleaning up’ the mess on the tray and making piles of ‘rocks and dust’.
All totaled, my toddler spent a good hour on this fine motor activity. He LOVED it.
And, it’s about the best $2 I’ve every spent on a box of cereal!
Check out my post on 13 Different Learning Activities Using Fruit Loops for all the other ways we’ve used cereal to learn and explore!