I saw this pin today but not on an Occupational therapy board. We had a box at home that we hadn't decided what to do with yet, so my children and I thought this was the perfect project. As you can see we haven't copied the pin exactly, as we wanted to enjoy the creative process.
I wanted to encourage them to design, to be creative and plan out their idea. We discussed what they wanted to do and how we should do it.
We spent time planning what materials we would use from our craft cupboard, and the stages in which we would make this. They also worked together as a team, offering ideas and deciding together on the design they wanted. The only disagreement was about whether or not to have ducks in the pond.
They wanted to make roads and quickly realized that their pens weren't showing up on the black background, so using some problem solving they decided to make them with paper. This was a good opportunity to practice scissor skills, so we drew some straight lines and practiced cutting. They then decided they needed something circular to make roundabouts, so we went on a hunt and decided old CD's were the perfect size for their cars.
Next they wanted to make a car park and so they measured the cars to ensure they could make the spaces the right size. We later used this to practice sorting the cars by color.
Most importantly they had fun and enjoyed the process whilst working on some skills. I tried not to be to involved to much in the creative and problem solving parts, so that they could work on these and I only offered some slight hints to point them in the right direction.
But I was on hand to supervise and to offer encouragement.
They have played with this for hours and have already told me that tomorrow they want to build a town to go with it.
One thing I thought of afterwards was that this type of activity could also be used to create a map of your own neighborhood. It provided the opportunity to talk about road safety and we discussed different types of crossings and what traffic light colors mean.
The design could also be made more complicated with tunnels etc and encourage more manipulation skills and build on a bigger scale encouraging gross motor skills as they crawl around their creation.
This is my first Pinterest post and isn't one of the 14 in draft.. We did this today and I saw all the obvious skills this involved, so I thought I would write it up now.
This was quite time consuming and it took us a couple of hours to make, but has kept them occupied for hours since!
My youngest needed quite close supervision with the scissors but it is a skill we had already identified that he needed to develop, so this activity was great for that.
My children are aged 4 and 8 and they both equally enjoyed the project .
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