"Learning Fingers": a set where the child learns to control each finger separately

Five rubber animal puppets worn on the fingers and a set of cards with 12 tasks. It looks like a finger theatre; it works as a teaching material.

Why putting the puppet on is already an exercise

To fit a puppet onto the little finger, the child must isolate that finger from the rest and hold it out while the others stay folded. This is finger isolation — controlling each finger independently. Without it a proper pencil grip does not develop: the child grips with the whole fist and tires quickly when writing. Practising isolation for its own sake is nearly impossible — it bores children. Putting a piglet on the ring finger does not.

Three kinds of task

"Identify by the babies" — the card shows the young animals (lamb, chick, calf, piglet, foal); the child works out whose mother is on which finger. Logic plus word formation.
"Copy the example" — the hardest type. The child transfers what they see onto their own hand: matching the drawn hand to their own, allowing for mirroring, and orienting within their own body schema.
"What the animals give us" — the fingers carry not animals but their products: meat, eggs, milk and cheese, a woollen jumper, a cart.

Left hand and right hand. Every card is explicitly marked. Laterality is trained inside another task rather than as a separate drill.

Finger names. The cards name each finger, so a specialist can soon simply say "on the ring finger".

Puppets take the pressure off. When speaking is hard, the puppet speaks instead of the child — a working technique with anxiety and reticence in unfamiliar settings.

 Before use

Age 3+, contains small parts, adult supervision required · rubber puppets are washable — valuable in a shared setting · laminate the card set for heavy use.