Alligator Fine Motor Skills Play and Math Ideas

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Today, “A is for Alligator” as we used tweezers and tongs to “eat” treats. Tongs are the perfect alligator-shaped mouth, and using them helps strengthen hand muscles for fine motor skills development. Alligator fine motor skills play was “school in disguise.”

Alligator Tweezers

My daughter and I have played with tweezers before to move and sort erasers. It has been a while. Now that she is five, she is much more physically able to do so. As I considered what to do for the letter “a” for play, I immediately thought of our alligator kids tweezers. They even have the teeth and eye of the alligator to truly visualize that we are an alligator “eating” the item in between the sides of the tweezers.

Strawberry and I made munching sounds as we “ate” the butterfly erasers.

Alligator Tongs

Then, I pulled out the kitchen tongs to use for a larger-scale “eating.” Now we used the “cookies” from the play kitchen to much on with our “alligator” mouths. The larger-sized tongs made it a bit more difficult. Strawberry noticed. She said after a few minutes that her “whole hand” was starting to hurt a tiny bit. Muscles in the process of developing!

Strawberry found it very silly that I taped mouths on to the tongs. It was a little more difficult to “eat” with the paper in the way. But, as you will see, I have a purpose for doing so.

Alligator Greater Than and Less Than

After we played with “eating” the food in this way, I introduced Strawberry to the alligators shown in the image on the tongs: “Guy Greater Than Alligator” and “Lady Less Than Alligator.” We compared two piles of cookies.

$Introduce the concepts of greater than and less than with an alligator fine motor skills mini-math lesson!$

“If you could have a pile of cookies, which of these piles would you like to eat?” I asked her. Then we’d face the open mouth of the tongs toward the largest of the two piles.

The way I’ve taped the alligators on to the tongs show Guy Greater Than Alligator’s open mouth facing the pile to the left and Lady Less Than Alligator’s open mouth facing the right.

We stayed with just comparing small piles (1-3 cookies). This is, after all, the first time I’ve done such a comparison activity with Strawberry. The idea of today was to have a simple play time with alligator mouths. Adding in a bit of mathematical concepts was just the mini bonus lesson to our alligator fine motor skills play.