If you’re looking for a quick and easy craft to help toddlers and preschoolers develop their fine motor skills, these Fruit Loops ornaments are about as simple as it gets. It can double as a Christmas Tree ornament and an homemade bird feeder your kids can hang in the garden.
Last year, I wrote a round-up called 12 Fine Motor Ornaments for preschoolers.
We’ll be adding today’s Fruit Loop ornaments to that round-up because it’s particularly good for fine motor development. I didn’t even have ornaments in mind when we began this activity. I thought we’d just have a little bit of fine motor fun, and use up some stale cereal.
It wasn’t until we were finished our activity that I realized we could turn our little Fruit Loop threading project into ornaments!
Grab a box of cereal, and some pipe cleaners, and I’ll show you what we were up to.
For our fine motor Fruit Loops ornaments, you’ll need:
- pipe cleaners
- fruit loops
- string for hanging
That’s it!
So, like I said, we didn’t intend to make Christmas ornaments when we set out to do this activity.
What happened was: I was about to throw out a couple of nearly-empty cereal boxes after cleaning out the cupboards. I could hear a bit of cereal rattling around in the bottom of the boxes, so I decided to pour them out to see how much there was.
Nice!
I had enough to fill two small bowls. That’s grounds for an activity right there!
We used the Cheerios to make bird feeders for the yard. You have to check them out. They’re so sweet!
And then we moved on to our Fruit Loops.
As with the Cheerios, the kids threaded the Fruit Loops onto their pipe cleaners.
Threading activities are so good for little hands and fingers!
You may also like our play dough and pasta threading activity.
Threading helps to develop pincer grip, and to strengthen hand-eye co-ordination.
When you’re threading with Fruit Loops, because they’re coloured, you can also work on colour recognition and patterning.
I always find that the hooligans become very calm and quiet when working on an activity like this. It really requires some concentration and focus.
When all of the cereal had been used up, we began bending and shaping our pipe cleaners to see what we could make with them.
Some, we turned into bracelets…
…and others became nifty looking, abstract shapes.
Not knowing what else to use them for, I looped a piece of thread through one end of each pipe cleaner, and we turned them into Christmas decorations!
What a fun way to use up the last of the cereal, and work on our fine motor skills.
And bonus… we now have some quirky little Fruit Loop ornaments to hang on our Christmas tree.
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Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
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