Fine Motor Skills, Handwriting, Letter Formation, Occupational Therapy Activities, Sensory, Visual Motor Skills

Lowercase Letter Formation Baked Cotton Swabs

by Colleen Beck
April 16, 2015

Have you ever made baked cotton balls? Today we’re sharing one of our newest creative play ideas with baked cotton swabs! These are a colorful manipulative for learning and fine motor play. Today we’re sharing how we made baked cotton swabs and using them in a Kindergarten Preparation busy bag to build letters. This is something you definitely need to make. You and the kids will love it!

Building letters with baked cotton swabs

How to make baked cotton swabs for sensory play:

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Start with a batch of Cotton Swabs and food coloring. Just like making baked cotton balls, you want to mix together flour and water in a 1:1 ratio. I scooped a bit of the flour/water mixture into a water bottle ice cube tray.
Add a few drops of food coloring to each section.

Dip the cotton swabs into the mixture and place on a sheet of aluminum foil. Continue to dip all of the cotton swabs. Position the aluminum foil on a baking sheet and place in the oven.

Baked Cotton swabs for sensory play, learning, and loose part play

Bake at 350 degrees F for 10-15 minutes. Keep a close eye on the cotton swabs. You’ll want to make sure the stick part of the swabs don’t start to turn brown. Pull the cookie sheet out of the oven and let cool.

Now you are ready to play!

Getting Ready for Kindergarten: Writing Letters

So how can you use your baked cotton swabs in play and learning? We used them to build letters, numbers, shapes, and pictures. Kids can match and identify colors. Use the cotton swabs to count, sort, and pattern. Work on visual memory by coping shapes and asking your child to recreate letters, numbers, and shapes.

All of these activities are a great way to prepare children for Kindergarten. When a child goes off to kindergarten, they are often times presented with handwriting and letter formation for the first time. You can work on a little Kindergarten prep work with making letters at home in a fun way. Use the cotton swabs to make letters with your child, and then have them create letters on their own.

Letter formation Busy Bag

letter-building-letter-formation-free-printable

We created a free printable for you to use as a busy bag activity using the baked cotton swabs. Children can copy and build letters with the cotton swabs using an upper case and lower case letter form.

Build letters with cotton swabs, dyed lollipop sticks, play dough, pipe cleaners, string, or other manipulatives.
Just for our newsletter subscribers, we’re offering our FREE upper case and lower case letter builder printable.

Use these printables to work on letter formation with your little ones. An adult can write the letter on the left side and kids can trace the letter. Use manipulatives to build the letters. Print off the sheets as many times as you need: one for each letter or laminate the sheets and use them over and over again for all of the letters. (If you laminate the sheets, you can use a white board marker to work on writing letters over and over again.