Busy Bag: Do-a-Dot

I finally went through and tried to organize and unpack our office.  I was looking for felt for a new project, and ended up getting motivated enough to finish the whole room.  Doing so, I found several of the busy bags I didn't finish in February when we originally packed up our old place.  Hopefully I will get some of those done in the next few weeks.

One of our favorite activities lately has been using the do-a-dot markers.  Apparently, these are a great material that are fairly clean but still allow kids to be artistic.  We purchased them months ago, and have used them in free art and also in working on letter formation.  The wonderful link below includes files with all of the letters.  I printed out all the ones in Theo's name and he worked on "dotting" them all.  He and Maci also used them to make birthday art for Eli.  They turned out so cute.  (We also ran into these at Meet-the-Teacher day at preschool, as well as the National Children's Museum.  They seem to be super popular right now.)

Materials:  Do-A-Dot markers found here, and the letter templates are great and can be found here.
Assembly:  Put the markers and templates in a bag.
Activity:  Have them use the markers to fill in templates, working on dexterity, hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills and recognition of numbers or letters.  These can also be used for a variety of art projects.