Training Glue

It's the end of the year and my classroom supply of gluesticks is very quickly dwindling down to none. Gluesticks have become a very hot commodity in my room. All my kids try to be the first one to get their hand in the gluestick basket with the hopes of pulling out a nice new gluestick, or at least one where the glue hasn't been jammed into the lid. So after finding the cutest poster about liquid glue on TpT for FREE, and also the fact that I have no extra supply of gluesticks, I decided it was time to pull out good old Elmer.

Liquid glue in kindergarten can be a very tricky concept. Little hands squeezing a bottle that is too big for them as they maneuver the glue onto their paper. What you end up with is a huge puddle of glue all over the paper. There have been several years where I never even introduced my class to liquid glue because I was trying to avoid the dreaded glue puddle.

The poem I found on TpT explains to the kids that they need just a little dot and when they're finished they twist and wipe off the top. (in much cuter words than that of course)

You can check out the free poster by clicking this link - Glue Poster

I knew my kids would love this poem, and I was tired of being the gluestick police, so I decided to start "training" my kids how to use liquid glue during their Muscle Hustle center. (This is what I call my center that focuses on fine motor skills, and no I didn't come up with that title: I'm not creative enough for that) I did get a little create though and named this idea "Training Glue." Very witty, I know. I pulled out a book of pre-handwriting tracing skills and decided to have my kids trace the lines with the glue in order to help them learn to control the glue bottle.

Success!! My kids loved it! They were so excited to go to this center and use the "big kid glue." My only problem was that once the glue dried you couldn't really see their tracings, it just looked wet. So I was sending home these papers that looked like they had weird wet streaks on the tracing lines. I'm sure my parents were wondering what in the world I was teaching their kids.

So this week I put different colored food coloring and some silver glitter into my glue bottles before shaking them up really good. Actually I didn't shake them up, a second grade student in our after-school program helped me out with that part. But the results were awesome! When I showed my kids their new & improved training glue, they were so excited!

Here is how they turned out.

Pretty nifty if I do say so myself. Although, I'm pretty sure I didn't come up with this idea all on my own, I probably saw it while browsing Pinterest one night.

Here's a close up so you can see the glitter better.