toning & zipping
- Lacing shoes
- Opening and closing bottles and containers with caps & lids
- Opening and closing doors, locks etc. with keys
Huh. Okay. Well, I think it’s pretty clear, that this is dexterity. And all these things are essential for everyone every day, if not every minute of our lives. We take them as given, not even as skills that we have developed a long long time ago.
Thus, mastery of dexterity requires not only precision and coordination but also a great amount of concentration and practice. So here is where our DIY robot comes into action. With your toddler of course.
DIY Robot from a small, used cardboard box, plastic bottlenecks and screws, a blackboard/ chalkboard sticker, magnetic pompons and crayons
- 1 small cardboard box with opening or window (I used here one cardboard box from a 6 pack glasses from Ikea)
- 3 bottlenecks with screws cut out from plastic bottles
- Chalkboard sticker enough to cover the cardboard box
- Optional: small magnetic board with 6 pom-poms
- Small LED flashlight
- Get your materials and tools together
- Measure, cut and cover the cardboard box with the chalkboard sticker from all sides.
- Place the cutout plastic bottlenecks where you want to have them and mark the spots to be cut out. I chose, for example, two bottlenecks for robot eyes and one bottleneck as a receiver. Later, those three bottlenecks transform at the same time to car wheels and a sirene of the car
- Cut out the cardboard at the marked spots and push the bottlenecks through the cutouts.
- Draw with a white crayon the robot's mouth and face, and with a black crayon the eyes on the plastic lids of the bottlenecks. He must look hungry! For the face design, I chose a car, because of our boy's obsession with cars .
- Now draw on the sides white lines for the road.
- For the backside, you have two options. Either you leave it empty, so your little one can draw shapes with chalk or crayons.
- Or, you add a magnetic board for more fun toddler activities. I had a small metal board with 6 magnetic pomp