DIY threading game for autumn
20.10.2020
Translation: machine translated
This home-made threading game helps your kindergarten-age child with fine motor skills, concentration and coordination. A simple craft project that is well worthwhile.
It's often uncomfortable outside in autumn and many activities are moved indoors. This is when other games come to the fore. My favourites are those that the children can play with independently. This allows them to immerse themselves in their world for longer and more intensively and become "one with themselves". When I watch my children in these moments, it warms my heart. For me, it feels like a "mini holiday" in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. A threading game is such a simple game. It can be used in a variety of ways and encourages your child.
What you need for this
For the threading game, you need foam rubber in different colours, several shoelaces, a set of coloured wooden beads and a hole punch. You can use tracing paper, a pencil, scissors, craft glue and possibly a printer.
A threading game in just a few steps
Step 1: Choose different autumn motifs for the threading game. For example, a hedgehog, fox, owl, mushrooms and leaves. You can draw them freehand on tracing paper or find corresponding templates on the internet, print them out and transfer them to the tracing paper.
Step 2: Place the tracing paper over the foam rubber and trace the figure with a pencil or biros. Then cut out the foam rubber figure.
Step 3: Colour the motifs to make them look more vivid. To do this, separate individual parts from the template and transfer them to the foam rubber. Cut them out and stick them onto the main motif. Alternatively, you can colour in the autumn motif with felt-tip pens.
Step 4: Punch holes with the hole punch in different places of the autumn motif.
Step 5: Place the autumn animals on a tray and the shoelaces and wooden beads in small bowls. Now your child can start threading. There are different ways of threading - from one hole to the next, around the edge or criss-cross. Just as the child likes it. With or without wooden beads. Anything goes.
I left a few of the autumn leaves whole to see what my children would do with them. I also added chestnuts, acorns and twigs as autumn decorations. The different materials turn something simple into something really great.
Settle down on the couch during this time, relax and watch your child while they play with hedgehogs, foxes and owls. These moments are the real treasures of everyday life, aren't they?
I'm more of a thinker than a doer. Yet I'm still always active: crafting, sewing, writing to-do lists, daydreaming, counting clouds, digging into soil, comforting my two little ones and collapsing into bed after a long day. If it were up to me, each day would have a few extra hours... I wonder if that would be enough.