Supplies for Build a Robot Sensory Tray
- Craft foam rectangles in a variety of sizes and colors
- Paper clips
- Aluminum foil (small sheets)
- Popsicle sticks
- Pipe cleaners
- Pom poms
- Googly eyes
- Toy nuts, bolts, and brackets
- Activity tray
How to Set Up
Gather all your supplies and place them on the activity tray. You can show your child the tray, or just leave it out for them to discover and explore.
How Kids Play
Children will have an opportunity to experiment with the combination of textures and materials and to test their imagination to create and construct their individual one of a kind robots. They may also superimpose pieces of foam to make bodies of robot and pipe cleaners to make them wrap into antennae and more parts to make it look funny. Foil strips and paper clips act as shiny robot bits, and toy nuts and bolts make the whole thing have a mechanical allure.
There’s no right or wrong way to build. It’s all about creative construction!
Key Benefits:
- Fine motor skills: Working on pinch technique using pom poms, twister pipe cleaners and connecting nuts and bolts all works fine motor muscles.
- Creativity and imagination: Children are free to decorate their robots any way they choose to have an open-ended play. Sensory exploration: There are different textures (smooth and soft and bumpy as well as metallic) to touch and stimulate group.
- Thinking like an engineer: Children can experiment with how things connect, balance and operate and this is in the roots of engineering ideas. Developing language: Children will delight in chatting about what their robots are about; their names, powers, etc.
Why this will be a Successful Activity to Everyone?
- Therapist Notes: This tray can serve as a stand-alone fine motor practice activity as it also makes an excellent tactile/sensory sensory bin or playtime activity. It keenly plays on bilateral coordination, grip strengthening, and pretend play, all of it with the same versatile space.
- Amazing For Educators: Adopt it as an art, STEM, language, and as a creative center. It teaches following instruction, cooperation, affirmation opportunities, turn taking, and problem-solving in an interactive and playful low-preparation form.
- As a parent: It an easy to setup and screen free activity that occupies and educates kids through play. Bonus- You will probably already have materials to use at home!
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Heather Greutman, COTA
Heather Greutman is a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant, who has patient experience in school-based OT services in the preschool to high school setting. She draws on her experience to provide child-initiated learning tips, tools, strategies to parents, educational, and therapeutic physical environments. She has written numerous ebooks among them The Basics of Fine Motor Skills, and Basics of Pre-Writing Skills and has co-authored Sensory Processing Explained: A Handbook for Parents and Educators.
Disclaimer: Heather Greutman is an Occupational Therapy Assistant who is certified.
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