If you are looking for a low-prep Valentines fine motor activities, then this is it. Sometimes, a quick and easy activity falls together without any plans. This Valentine’s Day Math activity just kind of happened one afternoon after we had some hot cocoa with sprinkles. It’s a kindergarten math or preschool valentine fine motor activity with a heart theme that will align perfectly with your Valentine’s Day occupational therapy plans.
For more Valentine fine motor fun, use these printable Valentine cards for folding, coloring, and cutting.
Heart math activities like this one bring on the fine motor love with big benefits! For another heart activity that develops skills, try this heart visual perception maze.
I know when we have sprinkles on anything, that they go crazy for any misplaced sprinkle. Is it just my kids??? I gathered up the random sprinkles (really, why do sprinkles end up everywhere??!) and a handful of hearts and we did a little Valentine’s Day math.
Valentines Fine Motor Activities
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We started with the leftover valentine’s day sprinkles from a hot chocolate treat. I gathered up the stray heart sprinkles
and had Big Sister pick out the other hearts from the tray of mixed sprinkles.
This is a fabulous fine motor activity with a big motivator (SPRINKLES!) and a fun way to practice pincer grasp (tip to tip grasp of the thumb and pointer finger).
You can encourage your child to tuck away a few sprinkles into their hand as they pick out the hearts. This is called translation from fingers to palm and is an important part of in-hand manipulation (manipulating items within the hand).
These skills are important in pencil grasp and positioning in handwriting.
We used hearts that we had leftover from another activity. These are just little hearts cut from pink cardstock. I wrote numbers on the hearts and had the kids put the correct number of sprinkles on each heart.
This was a fun (and tasty) math and fine motor activity for all of the kids, but my 5 year old was able to do some beginning math as he counted out the sprinkle manipulatives and matched them to the correct number (number identification) and my 3 year old counted along aloud.
All three kids were very happy with the end result of this math and fine motor activity…more sprinkles to eat!
more Valentines Fine Motor Activities?
Heart Fine Motor Math Activity
Heart Fine Motor Sorting Activity
Want to add more Valentine Fine Motor activities and movement tools to your skill-building?
The Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit is here! This printable kit is 25 pages of hands-on activity sheets designed to build skills in pinch and grasp strength, endurance, eye-hand coordination, precision, dexterity, pencil control, handwriting, scissor skills, coloring, and more.
When you grab the Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit now, you’ll get a free BONUS activity: 1-10 clip cards so you can challenge hand strength and endurance with a counting eye-hand coordination activity.
Click here to access the Valentines Fine Motor Kit.
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.