Clothespin Learning

Most of you know that working with clothespins is a good way to work on fine motor skills. Well, while I was surfing I found a great idea from the TeachMama blog which had article on a Clothespin and Letter Match-up Game. It's really a simple, and easy game that takes the therapy aspect of clothespin and makes an educational game out of it. You can see on her site that they write the letter or number on a clothespin and then clip it to the corresponding letter or number on the card. If your child is at that level then I recommend you hop on over and see how to make this game!

Gess, however is way past recognition, but still in need of fine motor work, so I just made a game that is more on her level. That's what so great about the idea, it's adaptable in so many ways! Since Gess is working on money recognition we made a game to help her identify coins and bills.

First I copied some play money, cut it out and glued it to the card. Then I made 2 sets of clothespins, one that had the name of the coins and the other that had the amount of money each was worth. Then I had her match the clothespin to the appropriate coin or bill.




I also have an Exact Change game that has realistic looking coins in it. So sometimes I have her just identify the coins by clipping the clothespin directly to them.




Gess finds it fun and engaging and it is sure better than doing a worksheet. As we are entering parts of speech I think I may try to find a way to adapt a game to that as well. As I said before, the options for game themes are limitless! What game would you play? Feel free to share your ideas!

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