We are SO excited to participate in the ABCs of learning series hosted by All Done Monkey. Each day for 31 days, a blogger will provide a craft or activity based on a letter of the alphabet. And each blogger will have a linky at the end of their post inviting others to share activities based on that letter. Link up your “B is for…” or “B-themed” crafts and activities below! Be sure to follow the 31 days of ABC’s Pinterest Board for loads of inspiration and educational play…all dedicated to the ABC’s!

We are joining so many talented and creative bloggers in this series and are excited to see all of the ideas shared. What a HUGE resource this will be!

When we were choosing the letter that we wanted to provide an activity for, we knew we had to go with “B”. Immediately, this Bountiful Bin of BEADS popped into our heads!

Don’t you just want to swirl your hands around in there and play??

We were gifted with this huge assortment of hand-me-down beads in every shape, color, size imaginable. We decided to create an art project using beads where we could also work on a little sorting, line awareness, and tip-to-tip grasp!

We started by drawing some pictures on paper plates. A sturdy background was necessary to hold all of the beads on our collages! Mom took orders of what the kiddos wanted to create. We had a request for a house, rainbow, and flower.

Fine Motor with Beads

A {ton} of glue later, we had a pretty good start on our collages. Picking out the correct colors of beads from the bin was a great sensory experience. Baby Girl definitely enjoyed the playing in the beads part of the project! Grasping the bead that was wanted from the bin required fine motor dexterity and a tip-to-tip grasp to pick out an individual bead. (Tip-to-tip grasp uses the tips of the index finger and thumb when picking up very small items…like a single piece of paper, a needle, a bead!)

Sorting Beads

Sorting the colors is a good early math concept for the preschool and early Kindergarten age range. The kids would decide what color they wanted to make a certain part of their picture and go on a search for all blue beads…or all yellow beads.

Line Awareness with Beads

Keeping the glue (and the beads) inside of the lines is perfect for line awareness and pre-writing skills. We used a sharpie marker to make nice bold lines for our pictures.

This little blue house turned out very sweet!