Learning with Clay

(26 Months)

We bought one of those fun triangle golf tee games that they keep on the dining tables at Cracker Barrel (yum).  I was thinking - oh this is perfect, we can use this for fine motor skills!  Then I was flipping through John Bowman's book, "How to Help Your Preschooler Build a Better Brain" (it has excellent ideas, websites to refer back to and a list of materials to gather).  He has an activity of placing marbles on top of each of the tees (to work on more delicate fine motor skills).  I would love to do this, but the thought of Wild One finding an escaped marble and then putting it into his mouth scares me too much to try this.  Instead we took out some clay or play-doh and I rolled them into small marbles.

They both practiced pushing the tees into the clay and inserting the tees into the little peg holes in the triangle.

Little Miss liked drawing with the tees into the clay.  She kept asking for a daddy A and a baby A, even though I kept insisting the terms capital A and lowercase A (I'll even accept big and little A's- but daddy and baby?).

At first Wild One kept pushing the tiny clay balls in between the tees instead of on top, but then he saw Little Miss put the tiny balls one by one on top of each tee and he started to do the same.

They both liked lining up and counting the balls.  Little Miss really liked working with the "pink" (that's what she nicknamed the clay).

They asked for this activity three days in a row now.  It's definitely a keeper.