Collaborative post. As your little one taps, grips and climbs, they will develop their fine motor skills. These are the skills needed to coordinate movements in smaller muscle tissues, typically found in the hands, arms, fingers and toes. Repetition of these movements will help your child to master these skills and be able to grip items for themselves correctly, allowing them to write and doodle. I have teamed up with an independent school in Surrey to share a few ways that you can help your child to develop their fine motor skills.
Help Your Child Develop Their Fine Motor Skills
Thumb War
Thumb war is a tactile game that involves grip and hand coordination to beat your opponent. This can help your child to practice gripping while also getting them to think tactically. It’s a fun game that even older children enjoy playing. Challenge them and see who will win!!! It’s more fun for children when they play with siblings so get them involved too.
Shape Sorters
Shape sorters are containers with shaped holes that have objects to match which are posted through. They can teach children about shapes while getting them to practice their holding, gripping and problem-solving skills. You can make these with your child by upcycling materials like milk cartons and cardboard boxes and can set them on a challenge to find objects that fit.
Pavement Doodles
Drawing is a lot of fun and can prompt your child to think creatively while teaching them how to grip and hold crayons. An even more exciting activity than this is doodling on the pavement. Your child can use chalk to create a masterpiece on your patio. Best of all, the rain will wash it away so that they can keep on designing. As this requires more effort and grip, your child will be able to exercise the smaller muscles in their forearms too. This is great for a wide range of ages and allows children to get creative too whilst having fun.
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Musical Instruments
Playing an instrument requires a lot of hand and finger movement in order to press keys, strum and tap. It can also get your child to exercise their creativity and reap the other benefits associated with music such as increased confidence and memory. The repetition helps with muscle memory and also strengthens fingers helping with pen holding.
Crafting
Crafting involves nimble movements such as those needed to thread, pick up small items like beads and colour. Tools such as craft scissors offer good practice too. You don’t need any craft supplies either. You can use everyday household items like pasta and string to make a necklace or a beautiful 3D card.
Rice Race
Grains of rice are tiny and make the perfect objects to practice with. With a bowl of rice each, you can race to see who can transfer the grains the fastest from one bowl to another. This is really good fun and something my son enjoyed doing when he was younger.
Having read my post about Help Your Child Develop Their Fine Motor Skills, did you have any suggestions to add? If not, which suggestion did you like most?
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My kids always liked crafting, so that helped for sure. My son has sensory issues, so I’d also have him play with musical instruments. It helped!
My granddaughter could use help in this area. These are tips that I will try with her
From a retired educator here, you hit all the good stuff! Piano playing is tops!
I miss this age. I loved watching my kids play and develop these skills.
This is an awesome post. I will be more careful with these aspects when I will be babysitting my niece!
I’d love to teach my kids some musical instruments and involve them more in arts and crafts.
Small muscles movements will definitely help the child develop their motor skills.
What a great post! It is so important that we assist our children in developing their motor skills, I use to have a few Shape Sorters
for my little one and he loved playing with it!
There are so many great ways to help kids develop their motor skills. It is nice how many toys and activities there are to help facilitate learning.
It really is and the options available are very varied.
I really love teaching my son how to use musical instruments. He really love it so much!
These are all really great and very effective tips! I love all of these specially teaching my kids about crafting.
I love these ideas! I’m going to try rice races later this week!
My granddaughter is about 18 months old, I’ll have to tell her parents about these activities.
Thanks for all these tips. I will definitely share this to my cousin because she has 2 kids that needs this.
My son had shape sorters, doodles and musical instruments when he was little. Never thought about the rice race. That is good to know!
These are wonderful tips, great to help them develop their motor skills. Nowadays there are lot of toys and activities to do that. Thanks for sharing.
Loving these ideas! I’ll have to share this article with my friends who have kids. They’ll find these tips super helpful 🙂
I truly miss when my kids were this little and their development of fine motor skills is so important 😉 Great tips here!
It is great to teach kids fine motor skills in fun ways like ths.