Recycled Ornament Garland Craft

Fine Motor Threading Activity 

We started with a big stack of recycled lids.  These are the plastic lids that come on children’s drink cups at restaurants. When you have three kids, you end up with a lot of drink lids!

Fine Motor Skills with a Roll of Tape

We used decorative tape that has been in our crafting bins for ages.  You can use (Amazon affiliate link) washi tape to decorate those lids.  The fine motor benefits of a child and a roll of tape are immense; There are a TON of fine motor dexterity skills that can occur by allowing a child to use tape.   A neat pincer grasp is required to pinch and grasp the sticky tape, while using the other, non-dominant hand to grasp the dispenser just right.  Pulling the tape and tearing it at the metal teeth of the tape dispenser requires controlled motor movements and eye-hand coordination.  Children will inevitably pull and pull and pull the tape when they first begin using a roll of tape, unassisted.  That’s ok!  They learn as they play and a roll of tape is a fun and creative way to practice fine motor skill.


Note:  If you give a child a roll of tape, you will end up with tape on the walls.  ((That should be the title of a children’s book! Ha!)) The urge to display artwork is just too great!

Once all of the lids are decorated with tape, grab a long piece of yarn.  We used a piece of tape at the end to make threading easier.

Baby Girl (age 3) loved this threading activity.  She asked to re-make this garland a few times in the week after we first made ours.  She did a great job of threading the yarn through the straw holes of the lids.  This is such a good way to work on tripod grasp and hand-eye coordination.

Pulling the thread all the way through the hole and pulling the lid down the yarn requires bilateral hand coordination to use the hands together in a coordinated manner.  This is an important skill for many self-care tasks like shoe tying, zippering, and buttoning.

We used our garland as a Christmas decoration by hanging them from our window sill.  While this is a fun Christmas activity, I would definitely recommend doing this as a fine motor exercise year-round.

Christmas Handwriting Activities

Writing out that Christmas wish list is a difficult task that brings out tears instead of holiday excitement.  I’ve got a solution for your kiddo with handwriting difficulties: a packet of modified paper for all of the Christmas handwriting tasks that come up each year.  Use this handwriting pack to help kids who struggle with handwriting to participate in holiday traditions while even working on and developing their handwriting skills!

Working on handwriting with kids this Christmas season? Grab your copy of the Christmas Modified Handwriting Packet. It’s got three types of adapted paper that kids can use to write letters to Santa, Thank You notes, holiday bucket lists and much more…all while working on handwriting skills in a motivating and fun way! Read more about the adapted Christmas Paper here.