**This post about Farm themed Fine Motor Activities for the Special Education classroom contains affiliate links, which means that I collect a commission, at no additional cost to you, should you choose to make a purchase.**
I don’t know about you, but in my classroom, the month of May is all about the Farm. We go on a farm field trip around the middle of the month and getting my students familiar with vocabulary for things they may see while they’re at the farm is important. So it’s no surprise that I’m coming at you with 10 Farm Themed Fine Motor Activities we’ve been using in our classroom!
With all the build up for our farm field trip, my students get REALLY excited about these activities. Here are 10 of our favorite fine motor activities:
1. Animal Beading
Beading is such a great fine motor skills because students have to use both hands to manipulate beads onto a string. Watching my students progress to pinching they string they’re using has been really exciting. With all the farm excitement in our classroom, I scoured Amazon and found these really cute wooden animal beads. When we’re beading them onto our string we’ll often lay out the animals and work on receptive identification before stringing (i.e.: Put the pig on your string).
2. Farm Shapes
Moving from cutting straight lines to shapes is no joke! Some of my students are working to start cutting out basic shapes. I love this activity from my Grab and Go Scissor Skills Activities. Students cut out small circles, squares, and triangles and to make it functional, we create patterns with our shapes or for students who are working on identifying shapes, we match them to a board! This is a great activity for getting students started with moving their paper around while they’re cutting out shapes.
3. Clothespin Legs
Clothespins are a favorite in our classroom! The ability for students to squeeze them to open and close them is a great way to build fine motor strength. In this quick activity, I put together some animal shapes that I gave a quick lamination to and I grabbed some clothespins. My students add the clothespins to the animal bodies. Want to keep it easy? Just use plain clothespins and students can add any clothespin to the animal. Want to make it a little more difficult? Paint or color your clothespins to match the animal colors and have students find the corresponding clothespin to add to their animal.
4. Dot Paint Animals
Targeting has been a HUGE focus with a couple of my students in the past few months. We working on our concentration and adding dot paint to circles is a great way for students to work on concentration and targeting. I made some quick animal dot pages and added a few circles to each animal for students to practice targeting with their dot markers. I also added a word for students to trace at the bottom of the page because this teacher couldn’t resist!
5. Find the Animals
I love a good hand strengthening activity and theraputty does not disappoint when you’re working on strengthening hands and fingers. I found some small animals and hid them in some theraputty for my students to pull out using their fingers. We love digging in the putty and naming the different animals as we find them. Sometimes we categorize them, too! Putting all the horses, cows, or chickens together in groups.
6. Snap Animals
While I love making activities for my classroom, sometimes there’s nothing better than buying something, opening the package, and being ready to go. I love these snap animals I found online because they work on some great skills. Students find the animal halves and push them together to make one animal. The strength they’re developing when pushing the items together is great for their motor development.
7. Farmer in the Grass
Scissor skills are important to fine motor development. Using this activity from my Grab and Go Scissor Skills boxes does not disappoint. So many of my students are using this box to work on snipping small pieces of paper. This skill gets my students ready for cutting straight lines. Using scissors appropriately and starting and stopping are some of the first skills you’re going to want to teach.
8. Pig Tails
This activity is just plain fun! When my students look at the pig bottoms and curly tails they can’t help but break out with the giggles. I made some quick pig bottoms and added some twisted pipe cleaners to a bin of corn kernels. Students use tweezers to remove the pig tails and match them to the same colored pig bottom. Not only is using the tweezers great for fine motor skills, but students are also able to work on color discrimination in this task.
9. Feed the Animals
If your students are just starting to develop their fine motor skills, this is the activity for you! I made 3 different “Feed the Animal” bins for my classroom. I attached an animal face on top of an old chip container and made a slit to add the food. I differentiated the items students put in each container so they work on using different shapes and different amounts of strength for their animal to eat their food. My cow eats green popsicle sticks (grass), the pig eats small yellow pom poms (corn), and the dog eats wooden buttons (kibble).
10. Bead Spelling
I’ve been working hard on some academic skills with some of my students the past few weeks. We’ve been learning our farm vocabulary and putting it to use when we’re reading and writing, so I incorporated them into our fine motor activities, too! I made cards for the farm animals we’ve been talking about in the classroom. I provide my students with pipe cleaners and letter beads. The students use the beads to spell the names of the animals they’ve been learning about. Stringing beads onto the pipe cleaner is great way to work on their fine motor skills while incorporating reading skills at the same time.
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