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How To Target Fine Motor Skills In Work Boxes

Instruction and Lesson Plans

Our students have a lot of needs and require a lot of practice in order to master and retain skills. It is important to figure out ways for tasks to do “double duty.” We need to use and design tasks that use students’ time to the fullest. Here are some fine motor activities to integrate into any themed work box.

5 Ideas For Adding Fine Motor Skills Into Work Boxes

It is winter here in NY, so my students are picking up “snowballs” with oversized tweezers. These tweezers take focus and require fine motor skills. You could use a variety of items to be picked up depending on your current theme. For example, students could pick up yellow “gold” pom-poms for St. Patrick’s Day themed boxes. Add a component of math by having students count the items into the container when given a number.
fine motor, fine motor activity, work boxes, special education
No matter which theme we are doing, we also have clip cards in work boxes. With clip cards, fine motor skills are combined with other skills. In the picture below, fine motor and math skills are both targeted. Clip cards can be used with clothespins or paperclips to target fine motor skills. Want to practice writing skills? Simply have students circle the answer with a dry erase marker. The clip cards in the picture are from the Making Sets resource.

clip cards, work boxes, math skills, special education

Another fun fine motor activity is stretching rubber bands onto a cup or similar item. Not sure why, but my class loves this one! If you want to integrate other skills into this fine motor task you could have students make a pattern or extend a pattern using colored rubber bands.

patterning with rubber bands, rubber band work task

You can also add in cut and paste fine motor tasks. The one pictured below targets cutting, visual motor skills, tracking, one to one correspondence, and gluing. This is one of the worksheets in the Making Sets resource.

making sets, cut and paste, fine motor activity

If your focus is more on pre-writing and writing skills, you could add in a worksheet where the student needs to respond in writing rather than pasting his answer. Again, you can target these fine motor skills while integrating a ton of other skills.

fine motor activities, worksheet, pre-writing skills
I hope that these ideas have sparked an idea for you to use in your classroom.
Have a great idea on how to integrate fine motor skills practice? Please leave a comment so we can all learn!
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