What an alliteration! Elaine Lambe from www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk uses festivals in February to provide inspiration for fine motor activities.

This February there are three festivals that lend themselves to art and craft activities, Valentine's Day (14th), Chinese New Year (17th), and Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day (20th)

Valentine's day offers the opportunity for lots of cutting out and colouring in - you can find plenty of ideas in the Resources section on Littlesheep Learning. Hearts are a simple shape that can be coloured or decorated with scrunched up tissue paper, sticking on coloured paper, glitter or feathers. Cut out the heart shapes to practice cutting skills, make them into cards and give them to someone special. For children who find cutting skills difficult check out the range of adaptive scissors available for both left and right handed children.

To celebrate Chinese New Year why not make a great carnival dragon. Colouring is a fun way to improve pencil skills, for children with fine motor difficulties triangular colouring pencils, and pens might help them to gain the correct triangular pencil grip. Making oriental paper lanterns is a great way to practice scissor skills – fold a piece of paper in half lengthways and make a series of cuts from the centre fold to about two centimetres from the edge, open the paper out and roll along the two short ends then join to make the lantern, add a string to hang it up.

Other fine motor activities for the Chinese New Year could involve eating using chopsticks (or the children’s alternative of tweezer like ones) or making lucky red envelopes (and filling them with money!). Some children may find it fun to copy Chinese writing too, use large paint brushes and rolls of lining paper to write big happy new year scrolls.

Finally, Pancake Day means making pancakes - this involves many fine motor skills. Pouring and measuring out the flour and milk, cracking the eggs, stirring the batter, ladling the batter into a pan, flipping the pancake and then squeezing lemons, sprinkling sugar or spreading on syrup or chocolate spread – are all good fine motor exercises so get your child to help you! You can find a pancake recipe here, but please make sure children are well supervised when near the cooker / hot oil and frying pans. Alternatively, have fun making pretend pancakes using rolling out play dough and flip pancakes in a frying pan to your hearts content!

Shrove Tuesday is also well known for Mardi Gras carnivals so get creative, make opulent hats and masks sticking on coloured feathers, shiny paper shapes and sprinkling with glitter. When finished bang drums, shake shakers and jingle bells and do a carnival dance!
 

You can find a wide range of colouring pencils, scissors and more at www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk