My daughter is to go to daycare in 2 months. I’m not ready! How did she get so big? My husband just showed me a video of when she was born, pictures of us in the hospital and pictures of her all swaddled. Now she’s 16 months old going on 17 months. We talked to the daycare people and heard they are going to be serving food and will have to learn how to use tongs. With her busy busy hands, she’s going to have to learn to use them. She’s going to have to practice more her fine motor abilities. So I’ve been searching Pinterest and found this activity using Pompom and tongs. I’m sure you’ve all seen it if you looked on Pinterest, so I decided to give it a try. I had most of the things already on-hand but decided I needed to buy her her own tongs, so that’s the one thing I bought for this activity. We also practiced some Chinese in it, I always love different activities so can talk with her about different things in Chinese. It helps broaden what we talk about and expose her to more Chinese language. Although my Chinese fluency is a little limited, I try my best. Here’s what I did for the Pompom Fine motor activity.
PomPom Fine-Motor Activity
What you need:
The object of the game is to transfer the pompoms from the bowl into the baking tin with tongs provided. There are different size tongs that will require baby to use different hand strengths to squeeze the tongs together to pick up the pompoms.
Result:
I thought this would be an easy activity for her but realized that baby has never used tongs before. She’s never needed to hold anything that requires hand strength, so this was a challenge for her. My husband suggested we help lend strength by wrapping elastics around the tongs and will help her squeeze the tongs together more easily. I realized that the pompom activity on Pinterest looked like it was catered to kids who were a little older than baby, so this made sense. Exposing baby to different activities will really help her learn and grow. We had fun trying to transfer the pompoms from the bowl to the baking tin. First she would just hold onto one side of the tongs and didn’t realize that she needed to hold onto both sides. I would show her, talked to her in Chinese. Have conversation in Chinese about – look at the different colors of the pompoms, what color is this, this is how you hold the tongs, let’s transfer the balls from here to there, mommy show you how to do it etc. We sat for about 10 mins, I must say it’s the most engaged she’s been in any activity we’ve done. In the end, she transferred a few using the tongs, the elastics helped a lot, but most of the transfer was done with her hands, which is ok too! It’s her first time with them so she did great.
Mommy Dragon
