Personal Manipulative and Fine Motor Development Boxes

I have been thinking a lot about how to continue hands-on learning in my kindergarten classroom. I believe that kids learn best when they are actively engaged in what they are learning. Therefore, I have come up with the idea of personal manipulative and fine motor development boxes. I bought all the supplies at Dollar Tree and Target. 

These are the supplies that I have bought so far. I plan to add more as the year goes on. I will explain what I plan to do with the supplies in the rest of this post.

This is a picture of what will be in each student's box. These items can be used for math, word work, and fine motor development.  There is a can of play-doh. There are three little containers, one has 20 clear counting chips in it, the second one has 20 two-color counting chips in it, and the third one has pony beads in it.

This is a personal white board made out of a sheet protector and white cardstock. The bag on the right has a set of pipe cleaners in two sizes. I cut five pipe cleaners in half and I cut three pipe cleaners in thirds. The students can use these to make letters, words, numbers, or shapes. This is great for fine motor development and word work. There is a small container of bubbles on the bottom right corner of the picture. This is for fine motor development (bilateral coordination) and for calming down outside if we need a break. 

I got the tweezers, frog jumper, and chip clip (cat) at Dollar Tree. They are great for fine motor development and math. I am going to add task cards to the students' boxes and they will use these items in their tasks. The tennis ball is from Target. The tennis ball has a slit cut horizontally in it so that it can open like a little mouth. The kids can feed pompoms, addition problems, or sight word cards to the tennis ball creature as they count, find the sum, or read the word. Squeezing the tennis ball also develops fine motor skills.

The craft stick is used as a spacer when writing words and sentences.  There is a whiteboard marker is for the personal whiteboard. The green and purple pen is a dual tip pen from Dollar Tree. The kids can use this during writing practice. It is important for kids to practice writing with different types of pens, crayons, and markers so that they can learn about how much pressure to use when writing. The highlighter is for highlighting evidence in a text that we are reading and for highlighting their names before they turn in their work (this should eliminate no name papers). The last item in the picture is a reading helper (also from Dollar Tree). It highlights the sentence the student is reading and blocks out the line above it and below it. 

These items are for math and fine motor development. There is a bag of 20 pompoms, a bag of 10 white beads and 10 read beads, a bag of 20 mini erasers in five different designs, and a bag of10 cotton balls. 

I will post some videos later this summer of a student using these items. 


I bought these floor decals so that I can remind the kids where to line up (for social distancing). Teal is one of my school colors so I am going to cut the stripes and dots from the edge of each circle and use the teal center dot only. 

It may be a different year (and many things are still in flux), but my kindergarten students are going to have a great year of learning. We are going to have fun and learn in a hands-on way.  I plan to get a UV-C light wand to disinfect other manipulatives that cannot be made into individual supplies. This way a child can use the items, I can sanitize the items, and then another child can use the items.