Activities and materials encourage children of varying abilities to develop their small muscles
a) Individual fine motor skills are encouraged through a variety of developmentally appropriate materials and activities
Materials:
Popcorn kernels
popcorn
popcorn buckets
large plastic bin
empty water bottles
cotton balls
spoons
shovels
child tweezers
The Popcorn Book by Tomie dePaola
Procedure:
Prepare for the activity by creating the sensory bin.
Add the popcorn kernels, already popped popcorn, popcorn buckets, cotton balls, empty water bottles, scooping utensils, and tweezers to the large plastic bin.
Read The Popcorn Book with students practicing appropriate reading skills (you can do a picture walk with them, practice prediction skills, and/or practice rhyming with words in the book).
When finished, invite the students to explore the popcorn sensory bin.
During play, you can ask them questions that relate back to the story. **Always monitor children during sensory activities. Discourage them from eating the popcorn out of the sensory bin for sanitary reasons.
Assessment:
Observe and record the student’s small motor skills. Were they able to use the tweezers to pick up the individual kernels? Did they use their fingers to pick up the popcorn and put it in the empty water bottle?Were they able to express connections to the facts presented in the story?
Note: Please provide appropriate supervision to the children in your care when completing all activities. You will need to decide what types of activities are safe for the children in your care. Appropriate and reasonable caution should be used when providing art and sensory experiences for children. Infants and toddlers require special precaution, only use non-toxic materials, and do not allow young children to put things in their mouths that are a choking hazard.
For Future Reference
When this training is over, it's going to be hard to remember all these lesson plans! We want you to get the most from this training, and continue to use this information in your classroom. We have put the lesson plans in this course, that are produced by Successful Solutions, on our resource website, www.Lessons4Learners.com, where you can continue to access them after your training expires. Be sure to bookmark the direct link to the page where the lesson plans can be found for easy access in the future at: http://www.lessons4learners.com/sensory-bins.html