Students entering the Young 5's program should be 5 by September 30th. Most students entering the Young 5's program are between 4 years, 11 months and 5 years, 5 months upon the start of the school year. I have 2 groups of students with 10 students in each group. My students attend school all day, every other day on an all year alternating calendar schedule.
The students in the Young 5's program are chronologically ready to enter the school setting but may not be developmentally ready to endure the rigors of the Kindergarten curriculum.
The Young 5's program allows these students a year to develop the foundational skills needed in Language Arts to enter Kindergarten the following school year.
My Project
Developing fine motor skills is essential for young children. Fine motor skills can be enhanced in so many ways, not just through holding a pencil to write or by holding a crayon to color. Young children need many opportunities to engage in hands-on play. One way to enhance my student's fine motor skills has been through the use of a DIY light table I created using a clear bin and Christmas lights. We would love to have an actual light table with more surface area and a clearer surface.
The light table can enhance fine motor skills by allowing children to pick up small objects and move them around the table, making shapes, arranging letters, sorting objects, picking up items with tweezers and exploring many more opportunities.
I have also included a small starter kit for the light table with transparent manipulatives and additional transparent letters to arrange to create order or words. The DIY light table I have created has provided students the additional opportunities to manipulate objects by using their fingers to grasp objects and move them around the table.
Right now, we have marbles to put into sectioned trays, tweezers to pick up marbles and water beads, teacher-made transparent glue shapes and letters to make words, small containers to put marbles or water beads inside, and teacher-made transparent letters made from colored binder tabs. We would love to have a real light table with more surface area for more students to use at one. We would also love to have more transparent manipulatives to use with the table to make additional words, sort letters, put letters in alphabetical order, sort objects by shape, size, or color, and to create patterns or just explore. All of these hands-on activities will enhance my student's fine motor skills.
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