For the first 10-15 minutes of the day, the kids have 'Tinker Tray time' During this time, the kids have a tray assigned to them each day. WIth an independent activity for them to complete. After which, they clean it up then come and join me and the other children at circle time. The tinker tray activities vary but they include math practice, literacy review, or fine motor activities. Here are some pictures to give you a better idea.
Spooning beads into baby food jars. Each baby food jar has a line drawn on it. Your child is to fill it exactly to the line with out going over or spilling the beans. Very tricky! This works with coordination along with fine motor skills.
Here we get to "Tinker" with a real Hammer, safety Goggles and nails. She is working on hamming the nails into the wood.
We use this pocket chart to review matching skills, sequencing skills and many more. They feel so important placing things into the pocket chart. This day the children were working on ordering the apples small, medium, and large
transferring pompoms from a bowl onto a plate using plastic tweezers. This works on one to one correspondence and also works those fine motor muscles!
One of our Trays is practicing counting. They place one marble on one dot until all the dots are covered. This helps with one to one correspondence.
"Tinkering" with strings and wood beads onto a shoelace. Lacing is a great fine motor activity and really develops that tripod grip we use for writing.
Try Tinkering with Unifix cubes. This really gets their little fingers working connecting the cubes. We'll also be working on making patterns with these later.
This is a fun 'nuts & bolts' activity. You match the bolt to the nuts (same shape) and screw the nut onto the bolt. An EXCELLENT fine motor activity 