Christmas Fine Motor Activities for Preschool & Kindergarten: Festive, Hands-On Learning
Keep preschoolers and kindergartners engaged this holiday season with fun, hands-on Christmas fine motor activities. Perfect for learning and holiday cheer at home!
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Homeschooling can be quite difficult during the month of December, especially when you have little ones at home. Not only do you have your usual homeschooling to do, but you are also trying to prepare for the holidays. All while your kids are getting more and more excited for said holidays.
I think we all know what that means.
Lots of noise with very little focus.
At least, that’s what it means at my house. To compensate, I try to keep our schedule as normal as possible. We also try to focus more on the Advent season rather than jumping right to Christmas. However, it is fun to add in Christmas activities little by little as we get closer to the big day, especially for my youngest.
Christmas fine motor activities make a perfect addition to your learning at home during the entire month of December. These hands-on activities keep preschoolers and kindergarteners busy learning while having fun working on fine motor skills.
Christmas Fine Motor Activities for Preschool & Kindergarten
Along with learning the alphabet and how to count, fine motor development is another important skill for preschoolers to learn. Fine motor development helps strengthen hand muscles children need to write. It also helps children develop hand-eye coordination and dexterity.
Quite a variety of activities exist to develop fine motor skills. Preschoolers and kindergarteners will love this hands-on learning and just feel like they’re playing. A big bonus for you is that most hands-on activities for fine motor development can be done independently. This frees up time for you to homeschool older children, work on dinner prep, or work from home while your little one enjoys playing while learning. Continue reading for ideas on different fine motor activities that require little advanced preparation.
Christmas Playdough Activities
Playdough, clay, and similar materials are wonderful for fine motor development. These materials are great at strengthening hand muscles as children roll and form pieces. Playdough is also a great tool to expand creativity and problem solving.
Christmas is a wonderful time for little ones to create with playdough. An incredibly simple activity is to put out a few colors of playdough, store bought or homemade work equally well, along with some small Christmas cookie cutters. Children will love rolling the dough out, pretending it’s cookie dough, and then using the cookie cutters to create fun Christmas shapes. Additionally, children can use Christmas playdough mats to create images.
Christmas Tracing Activities
Another great fine motor skill for preschoolers to work on is tracing. A child’s hands are not fully developed until well after they begin writing. This means many little ones aren’t quite ready yet to form words and sentences. Instead, offer them Christmas tracing activities to practice tracing lines. This will help them strengthen hand muscles and learn to focus on staying in the lines.
I like to laminate tracing activities or slide them into a page protector pocket. Then my little one can use a dry erase marker to trace the lines. The markers are smoother to write with than a pencil. Plus the lines are easily wiped away with a tissue so that he can redo the activity again and again without printing new pages. An alternative to drawing the lines is having your child use small items like mini erasers to cover the lines.
Christmas Building Activities
A new favorite for my kindergartener is using linking cubes to build objects. He really enjoys seeing a picture and trying to copy it with the cubes. I keep a small basket on a shelf in our homeschool room so that he can build whenever the mood strikes. He especially enjoys using themed cards, like the ones found in my Christmas fine motor activities.
Linking cubes are just one fine motor tool for building. I really like them because they stay together, but kids have to use muscle to push them together or pull them apart. However, other effective building tools like wooden blocks and Lego-type building blocks are also great to have on hand.
Scissor Skills with Christmas Theme
Working with scissors in an important, though difficult, skill to develop. Around Christmas you can find lots of chances to practice. First of all, have kids help wrap presents. Lots of fine motor skill is needed, from cutting to folding to adding tape. Helping make Christmas cards also works on scissor skills. Kids can cut out premade images or draw their own to cut out. Then they can glue these down on cards to share with friends and family.
Painting Activities to Develop Fine Motor Skills
Painting has always been a favorite activity for all of my kids. It doesn’t matter if it’s watercolor or acrylic, they really enjoy painting. This fine motor skill also allows the opportunity for gift-giving. Get canvas at a local craft store, like Michael’s or Hobby Lobby, or online. Then your child can paint a picture to give as a gift.
Another fun painting activity that really works on those fine motor skills is using cotton swabs as the paintbrush. My youngest loves using small amounts of paint on a cotton swab to dab dots around fun Christmas pictures. He likes to color the pictures before or after painting the outline.
Markers are also a favorite among preschoolers, with do a dot markers being no exception. All of my kids have loved using these daubers through the years. A fun way to work on fine motor skills with them is to have blank images with circles inside them. Then children need to dab the marker inside of the circle. This requires them to focus and line up the marker with the circle, which is great for hand-eye coordination.
Along with the markers, another way to use these same images is by having children place small objects such as pompoms or mini erasers into each circle. You can even add tweezers or tongs to challenge your children. I like to print black and white images for the markers and colored images for the pompoms.
Additional Ideas for Christmas Fine Motor Activities
The above activities are just a few ideas for working on fine motor skills during the Christmas season.
Children may also enjoy activities like
lacing Christmas images
making patterns or outlining images with Christmas stampers
enjoy Christmas music with a Clap for Classics course
pin poking or connect the dots around Christmas objects
creating ornaments
baking cookies
and more
As you can see, even during the holidays your little ones can work on preschool skills. Make them inviting by adding in seasonal activities. Your kids will love learning through play, and you’ll love the extra time their independent play gives you. You can find many of the activities premade for you in my store to save you even more time this holiday season. Set up a few activities today for lots of holiday fun!
