Ocean Animal Rescue Activity using Gelatine Cubes to Work on fine motor skills)

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There’s a fun way to work on fine motor skills to strengthen hand muscles. You can use playdough, clay or gelatine cubes.

I teach sensory classes where we learn through play. We work on pre-k readiness concepts, fine motor skills, gross motor skills and more… This week, the theme was Ocean so I decided to hide some ocean animals that the kids could dig out using sensory tools or play kitchen utensils or even using just their hands.

Sensory play is just that, using fun activities your little ones can learn without even knowing they are learning. Actually, play… that’s how they learn.

I chose this gelatine cubes sensory play using unflavored gelatine instead of ofJell-O because I didn’t want this activity to be super sticky. We were going to use the light table so I didn’t want the activity to be too sticky so we could clean it easier.

The key to making gelatine cubes is to make the Jell-O or gelatine harder than regular jell-O you would eat so that it is easier to maneuver.

What are we learning?

We will be working on strengthening our little learner’s hand muscles, this will be achieved with squeezing, poking, cutting the Jell-O and digging the ocean animals out.

You can make this fun sensory play material in two ways.

• Use regular blue flavored Jell-O
• Use unflavored gelatine -commonly used for making desserts like cheesecake.

For monster eyes sensory play activity we did on Halloween, we used flavored Jell-O in green and red, and for these Jell-O Ocean cubes, we used unflavored gelatine with some food coloring.

How to make Ocean themed Gelatine Cubes

Step 1:

Mix the gelatine poweder with half the directed water (4 packs will use 2 cups of water)

step 2:

Cover plastic container with parchment paper and place gelatine mix into container

Step 3:

Place animals into container and refrigerate for 3 hours. Take out and cut gelatine cubes.

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Expand the learning through playtime

I always like to read a story before we start our sensory play, this way they can use their imagination, do some pretend play as they recall the story we read and take more than 5 minutes playing with the material.

This is what we read in class and here are other great selections