Soft start activities are important to help ease into the school day. These help with pre-handwriting skills, strengthening hands, grasp etc and most importantly they are fun.
These type of activities may be going to the Dough Disco, which we do regularly. That is great fun! It might also be the ‘Cheerio Challenge’ where the children have to try and thread cheerios onto a skewer in a set time. Then, they have to try and get faster and improve on this skill. They love it. Here are some pictures.
We get to have soft start activities in the mornings before we begin any writing. Sometimes our learning begins outside, sometimes it begins inside. Here are some photos of us with a soft start activity. This helps us to build up our fine motor skills and is a pre-handwriting activity. It helps to strengthen our hands/fingers to help us with our pencil grip, writing etc. We loved it. What we had to do was build a tower using lego, but we only had a set amount of time to do it in. Then we got another go at it, the same amount of time and we had to see if we could get more blocks built on our tower to make it even bigger.
Have a look at the concentration while we were doing it! It was great fun and we rose to the challenge!
We got to explore and settle into our new class and school area. That was very important since we had been away from school for a little while. Here are some photos to show us having fun and doing exactly as the title says.
We have been busy doing soft start activities to help strengthen our hands to help with writing as well as get us ready for our learning through the day. Here we are using Lego.
Later in the day we did some topic work about the farm.
We made aliens today for our soft start activity. Later on we described them to a friend to see if they could draw the aliens without seeing them first. They only had our descriptions to go by! It was quite tricky but everyone did so well!
We used our fine motor skills to decorate our aliens with small items.
Now it’s time to compare our drawings with the real thing!
This morning, we started the day by adding watercolour paint on to our wax resist, night time sky. Our pictures will accompany writing we’ll do based on the story, “The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark.” Everybody thoroughly enjoyed seeing the magical stars appear through the paint. Somebody even said, “I wish we could start everyday like this!” We look forward to experimenting with more colours as we finish our owl painting.
Each morning, P1/2 start with a gentle activity to settle us in. Sometimes we focus on general motor skills, sometimes it’s a task to develop writing skills and sometimes activities that promote listening and attention. Today, we worked on fine motor skills to decorate our names by dabbing paint with cotton buds. We talked about our “Doing Hand”, “Helping Hand” and gave our “Sleeping Fingers” a soft pillow to hold on to! This aims to encourage a good pencil grip.
This activity helps with pencil grip.
Scott holds his bud with his Doing Hand and you can see his cotton wool ball “pillow” giving his tucked in fingers a rest!
We tried to dab carefully inside the lines.
Archie worked with care. His Helping Hand is holding the paper still.
Some chose to paint the coloured letters in a repeating pattern.
When we were done, we tried to dab our names by ourselves.
Some chose to paint with the buds like a paint brush creating lines and patterns.
P2 showed how well their fine motor skills are developing too.
Some pupils had more letters to write than others!
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