diy educational activities for kids: tray tasking

One activity they really focus on at Ayven’s school is tray tasking. Tray tasking engages kids in activities that prepare the whole body for development in reading and writing skills. It’s a concept where you set up easy, familiar items as a learning tool to strengthen eye and hand coordination. It also helps your child in learning to move from move from left to right. You can use things with textures, colors, flexibility, or even different sizes.

When setting up tray tasking, you want to focus on two major directions; up and down and left and right. You want the child to engage their hands, arms and eyes to work together and move in the up and down and left and right direction.

I thought this would be something great all families could do at home also.  It does not require you to go buy a whole bunch of stuff, just get creative and use things at home.  Here are a few examples of different trays they have done at his school.

Make Some Soapy Water Task

All you need a manual hand mixer and a bowl full of water and soap.  As they use their arms, hands and eyes they learn to turn the mixer in a clockwise direction to make bubbles.  It’s also building hand strength which will help them in controlling their pencils and crayons when learning to write.

Transferring Foam Balls Task

All you need is a pair of plastic tongs and a set of puff balls in different sizes and colors.  In this activity the child again uses hand strength to pick up each ball with the tongs, left to right coordination when transferring the puff balls to the other bowl and eye coordination when picking up the balls.  You can change this activity up by asking them to only transfer certain colors or sizes.

Building Blocks and Trucks Task

All you need is some wooden trucks and some blocks.  You can use any type of trucks and blocks you have at home.  This task is teaching kids how to use their hands to stack and build things.  It builds strong hand eye coordination but gives them a chance to do something really fun with trucks!

Wooden Clip Task

All you need is some wooden clips, two plastic bowls and a pair of dice. This task is great because it involves math at the same time. The child rolls the dice, counts the number on the dice then transfers that number of wooden clips to the other bowl. Not just by throwing them in the bowl but by clipping them onto the second bowl. It builds strong hand eye coordination and left to right coordination at the same time.