These free printable loose parts pattern mats are a fun and easy way to work on fine motor skills for preschoolers and older children.
While your kids have fun following the lines and making colourful patterns with the loose parts they are also working on their small muscle control, hand-eye coordination, and lots more pre-writing skills.
The simple shapes and lines on these free printable fine motor pattern mats are perfect for young children. Preschoolers will love the creativity of filling the patterns with interesting items, and they won’t even notice how much they are learning!
These pattern mats are a great pre-writing activity with a strong emphasis on fine motor control, but you can also include lots of simple maths concepts while playing with them too.
If your child is ready to move on to a more challenging pre-writing activity try these printable pre-writing patterns, and if you are working on letter recognition try these alphabet pattern pages.
How to use Pattern Mats
Our favourite way to use these printable pattern mats is with all kinds of loose parts.
Loose parts play is such a great, open-ended, activity that is doesn’t require any expensive items. Pop over and visit this article all about the benefits of loose parts play and you’ll also find lots of ideas for small, inexpensive items you can collect that work perfectly with these pattern mats!
Once you have collected some small loose parts just pop them in some containers, print out the pattern mats (find the download below) and you are ready to play!
My preschooler loved following the lines and filling them with loose parts. He talked about shapes, and colours and gave his fine motor skills a good work out.
Some of the patterns lend themselves to working with the lines, others to working with the shapes and empty spaces.
If you want to work on math concepts you could count how many items it takes to fill up a line, or make some repeating patterns. You could start a repeating on the line and then have your child continue it, and then get them to start a pattern for you to continue.
You also use the pattern mats with playdough, or coloured pencils or crayons if you like! They are also great for tracing, and they make really interesting drawing prompts!
Free Printable Loose Parts Pattern Mats
There are 6 different, simple patterns in this pattern mat set.
This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. It will fit to print on US ‘letter sized’ paper, just be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options to allow for printer margins.
Click here to download the loose parts pattern mats.
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
More Fun Fine Motor Activities.
If you are looking for more fun fine motor and pre-writing activities, try one of these ideas:
Work on letter recognition and prewriting skills with these alphabet pattern mats.
Try one of these fun and easy fine motor activities for toddlers and preschoolers.
These threading ideas for toddlers and preschoolers are great for fine motor development.
thanks for your pattern pages going to try these along with the Alphabet ones with my 5 year old. Love your blog by the way :)
Katie! These are simple yet gorgeous! Look at the fun results! TY
Love your blog:) look so fun
Thank you so very much! I have been looking for a print out like this for awhile. Love it. Really appreciate you sharing!
I have a very young kindy class this year so we will see what this sparks! Thank you!
Merci pour toutes ces idées