Who is excited for summer? No school, playing outside, sleeping in (ok, this doesn’t actually happen in my house!), swimming, running through sprinklers, and eating ice cream may be some of our favorite things! The one thing that I’m hoping doesn’t happen with my kids (or honestly with my preschoolers who are on summer break too) is for them to lose any of their skills that they worked so hard on mastering during the school year. One of our goals in my own home is to keep those fine motor skills going strong and this Fine Motor Ice Cream Cone activity is a super simple way to keep those skills up!
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Ice cream cone Activity
This is a completely homemade activity, so don’t judge yourself (or me!) on how your ice cream cone turns out.
Grab these supplies:
- construction paper or cardstock
- scissors
- glue stick
- kid-friendly tweezers/tongs
- itty bitty buttons
Putting our ice cream cone together took just minutes. Honestly it took longer for me to find a bowl to flip over and trace to make my ice cream scoop circle shape!
Cut out the circle shape for the ice cream and a triangle shape for the cone and glue them together.
Gather small buttons to use as sprinkles for your ice cream cone.
Now it’s time to play!
The object of this activity is to decorate the ice cream cone with button sprinkles. Each button sprinkle can be placed on the paper ice cream cone one at a time with kid-friendly squeezers.
Each squeeze of the tweezers helps strengthen the fine motor muscles in your child’s hands. So adding the sprinkles to the pretend ice cream cone is a simple way for preschoolers to work their muscles without realizing they are doing work!
I chose the smallest buttons I could find for our sprinkles. My youngest has great fine motor skills right now, so she could handle the mini buttons. For younger preschoolers and toddlers, bigger buttons may work better to begin with! Move to smaller buttons as their confidence builds.
This is also a great activity for older kids who could use some extra fine motor work that will help handwriting endurance too!
The great thing about activities like the fine motor ice cream cone, is that you can adapt it to fit your class’s or child’s individual needs. This activity can be completed with squeezers or without. Using fingers to place the sprinkles on the ice cream is also a great way to strengthen fine motor skills!
Up for a fine motor challenge?
There are ways to make this activity more fun with extra challenges!
- When you add the sprinkles, can you make sure that they do not touch?
- Can you pick up 2 sprinkles at one time?
- Can you add all of the purple sprinkles, and then all of the green sprinkles, and then all of the blue sprinkles, etc?
- Are you able to stack the sprinkles on top of each other without letting them fall?
We are all about fine motor skills here, so if you’re looking for other ideas, check them all out here!
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