As I’ve mentioned in posts before, I have a difficult time getting Dylan to write his letters. I gave up when he started preschool and just let them take care of it. Then I made his letter flip book and the interest peaked. I thought I would continue by giving him some more fine motor activities to strengthen those muscles, thinking maybe writing just makes him uncomfortable.

Enter pipe cleaners!

Pipe cleaners are so versatile. You can bend them into any shape, which means you can make this activity suit your needs and your little ones’ interests. Dylan is really into fish animals right now (his favorite thing to do is “ask google” to show him pictures of underwater sea life.) Not on the computer – we have to physically ask google on my phone to pull pictures up for him. But don’t worry, all the sharks are “friendly.”

I grabbed a basket from the basement (because when we moved and unpacked I realized I had A TON) and a bag of pipe cleaners. I bent the pipe cleaners into different fish shapes and took one pipe cleaner and bent the end so we had a fishing pole.

Here is my shark:

And here is my whale:

And then I just let Dylan (or in this case, Batman) go to town. He loved dipping the pole into the basket and pulling up different kinds of fish.

If your focus is letters, you could bend the pipe cleaners into letters. Or shapes. Or numbers. Really anything!