Dinosaur Swap Sensory Play for a Bit of Summer Fun

Kids universally seem to love to play in water, and a water table or tub of water can be a great alternative to having a pool or sprinkler or larger area of water that kids can play in.

Having themes in the water table is a lot of fun and can draw kids to it. I love this idea of making the water table into a dinosaur swamp, from the Imagination Tree. (Because most kids love dinosaurs, too, right?)

This is actually pretty easy to set up and includes a lot of natural materials in addition to the toy dinosaurs (you could also use other kinds of animals if you prefer). Include some buckets, nets or scoops for collecting and observing.

Throw in a dino-themed story book, and check out some more fun dinosaur activities for kids from Brain Power Boy.

How do your kids play with and learn about dinosaurs?

[Photo: the Imagination Tree.]

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

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