Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set
The Helping Hands set offers a convenient collection of four engaging and interesting tools to encourage fine motor coordination and control.
The set includes four of our best loved Practical Life utensils, offering a Handy Scooper, Gator Grabber, Twisty Dropper and Squeezy Tweezer.
The utensils can be used for an endless range of enjoyable activities, such as Practical Life transferring exercises or Sensory sorting and matching games.
The use of these tools acts as a fun method of preparation for writing. When using these utensils, children strengthen the muscles and master the movements that they will need for writing.
The Gator Grabbers and Squeezy Tweezers offer an ideal pre-writing exercise to develop strength, control and coordination in the hands and fingers.
The Twisty Dropper helps to encourage the tri-finger 'pincer grip' that is required for writing, as those same three fingers are used to squeeze the bulb to draw up or squirt out the water.
The Handy Scooper offers a great way of learning how to manipulate scissors, without the risks of a blade.
To learn more about each individual tool, or to purchase them separately, please visit the links below:
The use of the Tweezers, Grabbers and Scoopers for transferring activities can be staggered to offer increasing levels of difficulty. In my own Montessori classroom we utilise these different applications:
- Transferring soft objects (such as pom-poms)
- Transferring larger, hard objects (such as wooden beads)
- Transferring smaller, hard objects
- Transferring objects with a specific control-of-error (such as transferring small bells with the child being encouraged to move them without letting them make a sound!)
- For a particularly difficult challenge (ideal for older, more experienced pre-schoolers or primary schoolers requiring some remedial exercises of finger strength)...demonstrate to a child how he or she can use the tongs in one hand to hold a bead steady while using the other hand to push the thread through the bead!
The use of the Twisty Dropper can be staged to progress through stages such as:
- Transferring water between two identical containers,
- Transferring water from one larger container to two (or more) smaller containers,
- Transferring water from one larger container to a series of small vessels, such as an ice cube tray to focus on precision,
- Transferring water to specific marker or level (such as a line drawn on the outside of containers) to draw attention to measurement.