Coloured Cheerios and Pipe cleaners

This activity is great to encourage the use of fine motor skills, hand eye co-ordination, and pure creativity. 

I filled a tray with coloured Cheerios (Find out how to colour Cheerios here - http://nanniescreated.blogspot.co.uk/p/messy-play.html) and a few pipe cleaners and then presented it to the children. At first they just explored the different textures shapes and colours with their hands and eyes. I then sat with them and started to thread the cheerios onto the pipe cleaners myself, this encouraged them to copy me and carefully slide the cheerios from one end to the other. I then encouraged the children to count the cheerios as they threaded them  to encourage some simple numeracy skills.