Spooky Potion Making With Learning Resources

Its Halloween tomorrow! We are so excited that we have already been doing some spooky activities. 

As you know, Lily's Little Learners is not just about having fun, it's all about children learning through play. We often work along side Learning Resources and their toys to help make this possible. So when Learning Resources gave us the challenge to make a spooky witches potion while using their Fine Motor Tool set, we got out our cauldron and rose to the challenge. 

The Helping Hands, Fine Motor tool Set is made up of 4 tools. They are all different so children have to figure out how to use their hands to make them work. By squeezing, pinching, scooping, dropping, grabbing, this set will really help with fine motor skills and hand and eye co-ordination. 

The set includes - 

• A Gator Grabber
• A Handy Scooper
• A Twisty Dropper
• A Squeezy Tweezer 

The first thing I did was get everything out for Lily. I filled her cauldron with some water, some leaves and some plastic spiders and snakes. I then got her some flour, and I made some blue water with food colouring. 

Lily was so excited to be making a potion, she had also been wanting to play with the fine motor tool set since it came. Which shows that children do and can get really excited over educational toys. 

The first thing she wanted to do was place some spiders into the potion. I encouraged her to use the Squeezy Tweezer for this. It took a few attempts but soon she got really good at it and managed to pick things up and grab the objects and pop them into the potion. The tweezers are the perfect size for Lily's fingers and squeeze quite easily. This tool is really good for developing hand and eye co-ordination.

After the spiders and snakes had gone in. Lily wanted to add some of the flour to the water. I encouraged her to use the Handy Scooper for this. I was quite impressed with how well she knew how to use this. She held it correctly and managed to scoop a decent amount of flour into it. She then understood how to let go of the flour so it fell into the potion. This tool is such a great one for working on pre-scissor skills. 

Next she added some leaves to the potion. I crunched them up so then she could try and use the Gator Grabber. Out of all the tools, Lily found this to be the most difficult. It confused her that she needed to squeeze them to make them open and then let go to close them back up. She soon got the hang of it and with my help, managed to get some leaves into the potion. This tool is really good for developing the pincer grasp which is the one they need to learn for writing. 

The last thing that she added was the blue coloured water. For this we used the Twisty Dropper. Lily had never used anything like this before so didn't understand how to use it. I had to show her that you squeeze and then let go, and all the water goes up into the tube. Then you squeeze it back out into the potion. Lily quickly learnt how to do this and it ended up being her favourite tool to use. Soon we had lots of the blue water into the cauldron and it was looking very potion like. This tool is really good for strengthening the muscles in the hands and fingers.

I gave Lily a spoon to stir the potion and we chanted a magic spell to finish it off. She then tried making me drink it, luckily pretending sufficed or I may have felt a little ill. Over all it was such a good activity and the four tools really helped make potion creating become lots of fun. 

You can buy the Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set from Learning Resources for £7.55

What would you put in your potion using these tools?