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Today is a very exciting day. Today I get to share with you Deborah from Teach Preschool‘s new book Ready for Kindergarten!

Why is this so exciting for me you ask? If you are a reader of this blog you will know I have 2 preschoolers in the house, a just turned 3 year old and my eldest a 4 year old. I also have a 1 year old. As I enter each new area of development with the kids I hunt for resources and read, read, read. I was very lucky to receive a free Ready for Kindergarten to do a book study with! (All views are my own.)

About the Ready for Kindergarten book and what I think.

Ready for Kindergarten is a guide to Kindergarten prep and will take you from recognizing colors to making friends. The book is focused on play-based type learning, my favorite!

I love the layout of every chapter. It starts with an explanation then jumps into suggestions to achieve the skills, what your child should know, how you can help and reflect, revise, revisit. Ready for Kindergarten is now one of my favorite resources to refer to regularly. We still have a lot of work play to do on our journey and I am sure that many of our adventures will appear on this very blog for you to follow along.

For our Ready for Kindergarten book study I want to share with you some fine motor skills with pasta and play dough.

What are Fine Motor Skills? Wikipedia tells us: Fine motor skills are the coordination of small muscle movements which occur e.g., in the fingers, usually in coordination with the eyes. In application to motor skills of hands (and fingers) the term dexterity is commonly used.

“Play dough can teach many important skills, including:

– How to manipulate play-dough into different forms such as a ball or snake.

-How to combine the use of play-dough with other skills such as cutting, squeezing, pulling, pinching and rolling.”

Extract from Ready for Kindergarten!

Fine motor skills with pasta and play dough…

We make and use a lot of kitchen and house hold items in our every day play, from making our own homemade playdough to rainbow rice and color pasta. With this activity we combined the color pasta and play dough.

You will need:

• Play dough
• Some sort of stick, we used kebab sticks from the kitchen
• Straight color pasta, plain uncolored pasta will also be fine to use, but the benefits of using colored pasta is putting all the red ones on one stick and alternating color patterns.
• A curious preschooler or 2!

My 3 year old was fascinated by this activity and after a few tries had the color pasta on all the sticks. He seemed very interested in removing the pasta as well. All in all a very simple fun activity for some practice of fine motor skills as well as hand eye co-ordination. We have also used the smaller beads of our pasta in threading and making a pasta worm.

More fine motor skill ideas here.

My 4 year old also came along and stuck many, many kebab sticks in the play dough.

You are able to purchase Deborah’s book Ready for Kindergarten! from amazon and on Kindle.

Also take a look at our play adventure I posted yesterday: Exploring play dough with different effects as well as Play Dough Equals Occupied.