This is an excellent experience to develop fine motor skills, enhance hand-eye coordination, and practice one-to-one correspondence when counting how many stars were rescued. Take a tray or sensory bin fill the base with black tulle, place pre cut and painted + glitter recycled cardboard cut out stars, and place washi tape in a web like design, and lastly tweezers/tongs as the tool to remove the stars.
When a child is invited to explore an invitation such as this it requires them to concentrate on keeping the tweezers/tongs in between the web and pull up gently so that they don’t drop the star or get it caught on the tape. By using tweezers/tongs to pick up the stars the child uses their finger muscles to squeeze the tweezers in order to pick up each star. This fine motor skill activity helps strengthen the child hands for pencil grasp.
The child will have moments where they realize it isn’t as easy as they think it would be. Which will require the child to get focused and formulate new strategies on holding the tweezers/tongs together tightly while bringing the star back up out of the web.
After they have rescued the stars, this is a great opportunity to practice counting through one-to-one correspondence, which simply means counting each object in a set once with one touch per object.