Ice Cream Fine Motor Play

With the warmer weather on its way, I couldn’t resist creating an I is for Ice cream Fine Motor Play activity as part of our A-Z Fine Motor Skills series.

Unfortunately as my son is dairy intolerant we were unable to play with real ice cream. We opted for pom poms instead – this was certainly a less messy option.

Setting up our Ice Cream Fine Motor Play was straightforward. I simply poured our large collection of multi-coloured pom poms into a blue container. I already had four plastic ice cream cones from our Ikea ice cream set. However, I didn’t have anything to keep the ice cream cones upright.

I improvised by turning a recycled egg carton upside down and used a knife to make four holes. The plastic ice cream cones slotted perfectly into the holes.

Four ice cream cones didn’t seem enough though so I created six more using an orange egg carton. It took a few seconds to cut up the egg box and I used another egg carton to make a stand for the additional cones.

I left out a variety of fine motor tools so that my son could create his own ice cream.

These tools included the orange Gator Grabber, a yellow Squeezy Tweezer and Handy Scooper from our Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set, a purple Jumbo Tweezer and two Prepara Super Scoopers.

My son got involved straightaway in creating his own pretend ice creams. The Gator Grabber worked really well with the pom poms and he was able to transfer them easily into the homemade ice cream cones.

It didn’t take him long to fill three cones with different sized yellow pom poms.

Next, he moved onto the purple Jumbo Tweezer. Again the pom poms were easy to pick up and he created a further three ice creams using just white pom poms.

The Handy Scooper proved to be too big for this activity Although it was easy to scoop up several pom poms at once, my son couldn’t transfer them into the cones without the ice cream going everywhere.

My sons favourite fine motor tool for transferring the ice cream pom poms was the yellow Squeezy Tweezer. This is one tool we haven’t had much luck with up until now. The size of the pom poms were great for the tweezer.

Finally, my son tested out the Prepara Super Scoopers. This was the first time he used a combination of coloured pom poms to create the ice cream cones. And we had mixed flavours!

The second my son had completed all ten ice cream cones he picked them up and poured the pom poms back into the container. He wanted to start the activity again immediately!