Hi there. My name is Nerissa Williams and the kid’s activity I’d like to suggest to you today is threading or stringing beads. This activity, while simple, has numerous benefits for our kiddos.
Benefits of Stringing Beads With Thread
These benefits include strengthening of fine motor skills, threading helps with strengthening muscles and muscle control, encouragement of coordination skills, threading helps encourage use of both hands, bilateral coordination that we need for our day to day tasks. Directing your child to follow simple instructions during the activity such as put on the blue bead or pick up the square bead, or where’s the macaroni embeds learning opportunities into a fun activity.
For more advanced learners, we can prompt them to follow a pattern of different colors or shapes. Practicing and strengthening the child’s ability to push the thread through the narrow opening on a bead helps encourage development of eye hand coordination skills.
What You Need
If your child is ready to learn how to thread, we’re going to need to gather some materials. You can use a store bought set like the one I have here or we can be creative, using some items that you currently have around the house. We can create a threading activity using string and some leftover pasta.
How to Strings Beads
Just tie a knot on one end and have your child thread the pasta on the string. Make note of the different sizes of pasta you may have and try to choose one that would be most appropriate for your child. You can make the activity easier by using ziti or you can make it a little bit more difficult using smaller noodles, such as macaroni. We can also use pipe cleaners instead of the string. Some edible options we can use when threading are Fruit Loops and Cheerios. Now using these, we can create fun bracelets or necklaces that we can also enjoy later. Yum.
