Open-ended fun with Velcro craft sticks

So I’ve had this in my to-do list like … erm, let’s just say, for a very, very long time. I finally got down to making these velcro craft sticks for the kids – and I’m so glad to share with you it took me no longer than 5-10 minutes to dig out my craft sticks in the colours I wanted and add in the velcro dots.

Not sure how the kids would take to these, I decided to just make a pair of each of colour – and it’s really great that these were rainbow-coloured too!

Little boy didn’t really know how to match up the velcro dots so that they would stick so after awhile, he let his sister do the building.

With my girl, we talked about more shapes like the pentagon, hexagon, octagon etc., how many sides the shapes have, while we stuck to simple basic shapes like the square, triangle and rectangle with my boy.

I didn’t really direct how they should use these sticks and left it mainly up to them at first and realised that my girl formed shapes and played with creating patterns (e.g. blue, purple, yellow, blue purple yellow).

When my boy was alone with me while his sister’s at school, I got him to match the pairs according to the colours, and we talked about colours (you could discuss this in another language too – for us, we used Chinese). Since we had 1-1 time, I also taught him about the rough and puffy sides of velcro and how he should match them up so it was also a sensory activity for him as he touched all the velcro dots and told me whether it was rough or soft. He especially loved to dangle the sticks stuck onto each other in mid-air. Actually I also noted that aiming to let one velcro dot match up with the other took some judgement and fine motor skill so this is quite a good activity for toddlers. *no photos for these activities and observations as I didn’t want to disrupt his learning*

The kids also extended the activity on their own one fine day by taking out their beanbag turtles – in the exact colours – and matched the sticks to the turtles and eventually the craft sticks became swords for the turtles, and a war ensued. 🙂

If you have any more extension activities for these craft sticks, please drop me a note! 🙂

Other sensory activities:

• Beans for sensory play
• Farm sensory bin
• Ocean themed sensory bin
• Coloured salt sensory bin
• Penguin small world play
• Sensory bags for babies and kids
• Ice alphabet letters play
• Fall scented cloud dough
• Exploring velcro (with velcro craft sticks – open-ended fun!)
• Home-made playdoh & playdoh mats printables list
• Christmas playdoh
• Contact paper process art
• Shaving foam with water beads sensory play

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