Blogs Busy bags are ready to go activities that you can use with young students and students with special needs. The busy bags we have created here focus on increasing fine motor skills for your learners, but a busy bag could be used to increase many different skills (i.e. sorting, letter identification, counting, etc.) Check out this video blog for a better understanding of how busy bags can help your students with fine motor activities.
Video Transcript
Hi there, my name is Keely, from Learner’s Edge, and I’m talking to you today about Busy Bags to improve fine motor skills.
Small children, and some students with disabilities, need assistance to increase their fine motor skills, which are really small muscle movements with your hands. I’ve created two busy bags here, and they’re just kept in these sealable folders, but you can also use Ziplock bags or pencil pouches to keep items together.
The first one, I literally just purchased at the dollar store. And these are just lace-up activities, so the student would just pull one or two out of the Busy Bag and just begin to lace them. And this is just great for fine motor skills and trying to improve those in students. It’s also a very independent, quiet activity to keep the volume in your classroom down as well.
This Busy Bag is another one that I built, and there are just some cards here with numbers on them. And students can practice counting and their one-to-one correspondence skills, at the same time that they’re strengthening their fine motor skills.
One option is to just have the student put the correct number of erasers onto the board. Here we have a 7, so the student’s job is to take, with their pincer grasp, and actually move the erasers over to the card so that they have the correct number on the card. And then a peer or a teacher can check them as well.
One other option is to use stickers and the student can just peel the sticker off. Again, good for the pincer grasp, and just put the correct number of stickers onto the card. And again, the teacher can check that.
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