This robin craft is a fun activity for Spring that develops fine motor skills, bilateral coordination, eye-hand coordination, and precision skills. This is the perfect addition to the occupational therapist’s Spring fine motor activities and a great tool for kids to make that they also use to work on skills in occupational therapy. Plus, the worm activity is just fun for kids! Use this egg carton craft to work on so many fine motor skills!
Robin Craft with an Egg Carton
Spring and Robins go hand in hand. We made this Robin craft as a Spring Fine Motor activity one day and the kids were giddy with excitement to play!
This robin craft is a busy bag type of activity will keep the kids busy and little fingers moving as they count worms to feed the Spring robins.
This egg carton family of robins was fun to make with the kids and even more fun to watch them play.
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Robin Craft Fine MOtor Activity
This Spring craft for occupational therapy actually uses a recycled cardboard egg carton. There are many ways to use recycled materials in crafts and activities that develop skills. This is just one fun idea.
Time needed: 20 minutes.
How to make a robin craft with an egg carton
- Start with an egg carton.
We used a cardboard carton so the paint would stick. You’ll need a clean and dry egg carton. Cut off the lid off the egg carton. You’ll want to keep the egg sections for this robin craft.
- Paint the egg carton.
Paint a red belly on each egg compartment. Paint the sides and back of each robin with brown paint. You can paint the whole egg section or you can leave a space at the top to add a number, depending on if you are making a family of robins, or each student is making a single robin.
- Punch a hole in each egg carton compartment.
Use a hole punch to punch a hole towards the top of the robin. This will be the beak of the robin, and where students will “feed” pipe cleaner worms to feed the birds. Little Guy (age 5) got a big kick with this part. He wasn’t able to squeeze the hole puncher to make the holes, but he really liked watching!
- Make paper beaks for the robin craft.
Cut small triangles from yellow cardstock. Drag the wide end of the triangles in glue and press into the holes. These will be the beaks for the robins. Let the glue dry.
- Make pipe cleaner worms!
Cut brown pipe cleaners into small sections. The worms can be as small as an inch or two or much longer. Show the student how to bend the pipe cleaner slightly to create wiggly worms. This is a simple worm craft of it’s own! This is also a great bilateral coordination and scissor skill activity for Spring. Kids love making pipe cleaner worms!
- Draw Eyes on the Egg carton robins.
Use a permanent marker to make two small dots for eyes for the robins. You can also add a number on the top of each robin. Now it’s time to count and play!
Now it’s time to play and feed the robins!
Pipe Cleaner Worm Craft
Three is just something about those pipe cleaner worms. Kids love making them and using them to feed the robins. Let’s take a look at skills that are being developed with this fine motor task.
Little Guy enjoyed cutting pipe cleaners and bending them into little bendy worms. Cutting and bending the pipe cleaners is a bilateral coordination task that requires using both sides of the body with different motor plans and degrees of strengthening. This task is a great one for building motor plans and focusing on graded strength.
Cutting the pipe cleaners is a scissor skills task that requires and develops hand strength. What a great hand strengthening activity this is! Squeezing the scissors requires a lot of hand strength to snip the pipe cleaners.
Make a bunch of worms; You will need them!
Feed the Robins Craft
If you draw numbers on the top of each robin, you can feed each bird the correct number of worms. But, if you are working with a whole caseload or class of students, collecting many egg cartons can be difficult. You could always use just one egg carton section for each student so they have their own individual bird craft to make and feed.
In that case, skip adding a number to the top of the egg carton. Users can roll a dice and feed the bird that number of pipe cleaner worms.
This activity builds several fine motor skill areas:
- Eye-hand coordination
- Bilateral coordination
- Separation of the sides of the hand
- Pincer grasp to pick up the pipe cleaner
- Tripod grasp, or a refined tip to tip grasp to thread the pipe cleaner into the bird
- In-hand manipulation- Pick up several pipe cleaners at once and hold them in the palm of the hand. Then, feed one worm pipe cleaner at a time to “feed the robin”!
Robin Math Activity
To expand on the eye-hand coordination skill work, and to make this a great multisensory learning activity, use this as a one-to-one correspondence task for preschoolers. Young children can count the number of pipe cleaner worms, match the number to the works, and build pre-writing skills through play.
Little Sister (age 3.5) counted out the number of worms for each bird (She needed help with one-to-one correspondence). She was able to press the worms into the robin mouths using a tripod grasp.
It was fun to watch her play and count for a long time. I overheard a little dramatic play happening as she talked to the robins and pretended they were a family eating their lunch.
Use the Robin Craft to Build Skills Over and Over Again
This egg carton robin was a tool we made once and then used over and over again, making it a great fine motor activity for the occupational therapy toolbox.
Use it in a robin sensory bin! Add the pipe cleaner worms to a sensory bin and kids can find the worms and then feed them into the robin. There are so many ways to build skills with this one craft.
Spring Fine Motor Kit
Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!
Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:
- Lacing cards
- Sensory bin cards
- Hole punch activities
- Pencil control worksheets
- Play dough mats
- Write the Room cards
- Modified paper
- Sticker activities
- MUCH MORE
Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.
Grab your copy of the Spring Fine Motor Kit and build coordination, strength, and endurance in fun and creative activities. Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
