Happy Pirate Month Everyone! This is one of our Fine Motor Skills Lessons for this unit. Find more Lesson Plans, Skills and Printables at the main unit page HERE.

Lesson: Bead Threading
Gain: Pincer grip,  patience, hand eye coordination
Materials needed: Beads, String assortment, Pipe Cleaners
All of my materials were picked up at garage sales and thrift stores! 
Instruction: This lesson is Guided Practice with role modeling, followed by independent discovery and conversation.

This is a Mess Mat Activity that I facilitate in the Fine Motor Guided Practice Block in our schedule. However on this day Cash expanded his classroom, insisting that he would make “no mess” today…

I start my lesson by opening the box in front of Cash. I pull out several strings and proceed to put beads on the while he watches how I do it. You could start this way too or completely allow independent discovery. I work in a truncated window of time so I needed him to know already what he was supposed to do to achieve the fine motor goals. If this was purely a Discovery Box I would have guided nothing.
It doesn’t take Cash too long to dig in and start messing with the new stuff! He actually prefers to take beads OFF then to put them on right now, and I’m okay with that. We’re just starting. We did discovery though that the pipe cleaners make great bracelets!

Conversations: Since Cash didn’t want to put the beads on, I let him choose which beads I would put on for him, then he’d wear the bracelet. Aside from Fine Motor Development, lessons like this offer opportunity for conversations about great adjectives. We talked about…

• Patterns and what size comes next
• Colors and which is darker and lightest
• Which one is in the middle, left and right
• Can you find it? It is “between” the dark beads. 

 

We’ll continue to thread beads and let you know how things develop by the end of the month! maybe he’ll thread his own by then!