Last spring when school shut down we had 2 preschoolers. Doing preschool “virtually” is not easy. Our awesome teachers would put together packets for the week of activities to do at home. One of the activities was for them to work on fine motor and strengthening their fingers to hold a pencil. The activity was so simple: pom poms and a clothes pin. They loved it and it inspired today’s St. Patrick’s Day fine motor activity.

We did the activity a lot between the 2 boys because it was something I could actually get them to do (writing letters was a battle!). We would switch up what they had to put the pom poms into: sometimes fill bowls, sometimes the back of their toy pick up trucks!

I’ve noticed lately that my preschooler doesn’t seem to hold his pencil very well and while he knows his letters very well and how to make them, it looks like he is barely touching the paper when he writes. I decided to bust out the clothes pins and pom poms to get him to strengthen his little fingers. Since St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, I decided to make it a festive activity with pots of gold!

I got the little pots of gold on Amazon. These are cute to use for a variety of St. Patrick’s Day activities, parties, etc. They can also be reused in October for Halloween activities (witch’s caldrons!).

St. Patrick’s Day Fine Motor Activity for Kids

Supplies:

Mini leprechaun pots
Gold pom poms
Clothespins

Directions:

Set up your “pots of gold” and scatter the “gold” all around them. Tell the child to get all the gold into the pots only using the clothespin. If you have different size pom poms you can also have them sort by size. One more idea to make it more challenging: put a number in front of each pot and have them fill each pot with that many pom poms. Then you’re doing fine motor and math!