When developing curriculum, preschool teachers and daycare providers must include age-appropriate activities for young children that develop fine motor skills. Thanksgiving Dinner Collage is an activity that will support a Thanksgiving theme as well as promote visual motor coordination, bilateral coordination, and hand strength.
What are Fine Motor Skills?
According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Children’s Health [Gale, 2005], fine motor skills are actions that involve the small movement of hands, wrists, feet, fingers, toes, tongue, and lips. Motor skills are “divided into two groups: gross motor skills, which are the larger movements of arms, legs, feet, or the entire body (crawling, running, and jumping); and fine motor skills, which are smaller actions, such as grasping an object between the thumb and a finger or using the lips and tongue to taste objects.” This lesson plan focuses on fine motor skills.
Fine motor skills focus on small muscle movements in coordination with the eye. Some important fine motor concepts and skills that preschool age children learn to master are bilateral coordination, visual motor coordination, grasp, hand use, manipulation skills, pincer grasp, wrist rotation, pre-writing grasp, hand strength, and tactile awareness.
Children learn fine motor skills through practice. Activities which involve writing, drawing, cutting, stringing, and buttoning are great examples of activities that promote the development of fine motor skills.
This Thanksgiving Dinner Collage lesson plan includes the preparation instructions, procedure, and materials list for this activity. It also provides age-appropriate learning objectives and a sample of the simple supporting verbal cues necessary to encourage participation and support learning.
Thanksgiving Dinner Collage Materials
- Construction paper in fall colors
- Scissors for children
- Glue
- Grocery store advertisements
Thanksgiving Dinner Collage Activity Procedures
Cover a table with butcher paper. Place all materials on the table. Invite the children over to craft area. Explain to them that you are going to create a Thanksgiving dinner collage. Talk about all of the delicious things that are traditionally eaten at a Thanksgiving feast. Explain that the children will cut out the items from the grocery ads that they would like to have at their own Thanksgiving feast and glue them onto the paper to create a collage. Allow the children create the collage and then let each child share his or her Thanksgiving feast.
Fine Motor Learning Objectives
Objective 1: To provide the opportunity to Increase bilateral coordination, hand strength, and visual-motor coordination by squeezing glue containers
- Verbal Cue A: Let’s glue the pictures on the construction paper.
- Verbal Cue B: Can you squeeze a little glue on the back of the picture?
Objective 2: To provide the opportunity for increased visual-motor coordination by using scissors to cut straight lines
- Verbal Cue A: Can you cut the turkey (or other item) out of the paper in the ad?
- Verbal Cue B: I like how you are cutting straight across the paper.
Objective 3: To provide the opportunity for increased visual-motor coordination by using scissors to cut curvy lines
- Verbal Cue A: Can you cut around the potatoes (or other item) in the ad?
- Verbal Cue B: I like the way you are cutting around those curvy pictures.
Children will have a fun time creating a lavish Thanksgiving feast while enhancing their fine motor skills. This activity was adapted from The Preschool-Learning-and-Crafts.com website.
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