Beans and Grains

This is what we do every Wednesday, Noa and I. Honing her fine motoric and finger precision skills using a pair of tweezers , beans and grains. I try to provide her a choice (but not too much) of different beans and grains to provide different color and texture. So, we have mung beans for green, red beans for red, corn for yellow and split lentil for brown.

The idea is to decorate something (it could be anything from a drawing or a jewellery box) with these beans and grains. This time I used an old coloring book from yonder years that had never been filled. It had stayed in the drawer as the girls grew older and got disinterested by its simple drawings or maybe just the fact that the book contain no princesses at all. Anyway, I thought our old forgotten coloring book would be perfect for this exercise since it has only simple designs, bold outlines and a lot of white space.

To make this a little trickier, I have assigned Noa to pick up each beans or grains she’d like to use with a pair of tweezers. My tweezers are the small normal ones (used weekly to shape my eyebrows), of course you can use bigger pair like the ones they have in toy doctor set or in the ones for cooking (usually used to debone fish). I wanted to make this more complicated just to refine her fine motoric skills so normal tweezers it is. I did help her a bit in guiding where the beans should go, but she did all the picking and placing entirely by herself.

For younger children, you can use dried pasta or buttons instead as they are bigger in size and are easier to handle. To add more challenge, use smaller objects for example; grains of rice. You can use any kind of paper glue but the best, I find, is PVA glue. It is stronger yet it dries slower than glue sticks therefore it gives you more time and possibilities to change or move your decorations around.

Kudos, Noa!