The Best Fine Motor Activities For Kids

skills through a range of fine motor activities for kids allows muscles to learn the correct way to work and to aid in day to day living. Learning how to utilise fine motor skills for kids is a starting block to help with future movement and development of their body and functioning with objects. There are an array of fine motor activities for kids to allow them to develop these skills and learn new tasks. Examples of fine motor skills can include how to hold your cutlery or learning how to tie your lace. These are daily tasks that are incredibly important, thus fine motor skills should be carefully attuned to make your child’s life easier.

 

What are Fine Motor Skills?

Fine motor skills are small movements that we use daily. Examples of fine motor skills include picking up smaller objects and using them. Eating yoghurt with a spoon is a fine motor skill activity as you are using the small muscles of the fingers, wrists, lips, and tongue. The opposite of fine motor skills is gross motor skills. These are the larger movements that allow for the finer motor skills to function. These include things like rolling over and sitting. They use larger muscles like your arms, legs, feet, and torso.

There are plenty of wonderful fine motor skills for kids that can be learned creatively, engaging your children and allowing them to perform daily functions unaided. Using fine motor skills for kids is incredibly important as you are teaching incredibly complex movements. Due to age, you have been using fine motor skills without realising for a significant period. Your child doesn’t have that advantage. Breaking down these complexities and allowing the brain and the muscles to develop coordination is in an incredibly important part of physical and mental development. These are built on gross motor skills, but it is the finer motor skills that allow us and your child to have independence. With plenty of fine motor activities for kids, they’ll enjoy exercising these muscles in a controlled and creative fashion.

Examples of Fine Motor Skills: How to Move

As we have discerned, fine motor skills are the smaller muscle movements in the body, and there are plenty of examples of fine motor skills to help us understand how we can help our children best. These fine motor skills for kids could be using safety scissors, manipulating play-dough, opening and closing doors, using a computer mouse, holding cutlery, holding pencils and using them, getting dressed and dealing with buttons and zips, tying laces, building blocks into a house. The list is endless and there are plenty of opportunities to enjoy learning these skills with your children.

Allowing children to learn through fine motor activities provides them with a fun and creative way of learning tasks that will aid them as an adult, in a constructive and light environment. Honing in on fine motor skills allows for further advanced movement of smaller muscles and will give children confidence in their physical abilities.

 

Learning Through Play: Fine Motor Skills Materials

There are plenty of materials that aid with fine motor skills and make it easier for children to engage with their muscles. Using these materials can make it easier for your children to interact and perform daily activities. Buttons are great material for developing fine motor skills. Due to their small size, a lot of hand-eye coordination goes into making them easier to use. Learning to pick them up and becoming familiar with their shape is an act that children will be involved in as they grow older, so learning that finger strength is key.

Children love to play with play dough and this material is fun to make and a brilliant way to enhance fine motor skills. Learning to push the dough, kneading it with their hands and rolling it, all help develop their small hand muscles. Little craft pom poms are fantastic as they are tiny. This teaches small movements as children learn to pick them up and move them around. This is another example of fine motor skills that allow for hand-eye coordination.

A fun material to use is elastic bands. Stretching them and becoming familiar with rubber is a great way to exercise the muscles and build finger strength. Pipe cleaners and straws function as a means to practice bending and threading, skills that are incredibly useful for children. They can function with other materials like fabric and play dough as well. Paper clips are a great tool to teach manipulation and exercise finger muscles. It takes concentration to place paper together with paperclips, which is a fantastic use of fine motor skills. Everyone loves stickers and they’re another great material to aid your children with fine motor skills. Try getting the children to peel the stickers off the sticker sheet. It is tricky not ripping the sheet and damaging the other stickers, and works as fantastic fine motor activity. Once the sticker is removed, hand-eye coordination is required to place it on the paper evenly.

Getting your children to practice with droppers or empty, non-needle syringes is another wonderful way to practice their fine motor skills. Get them to draw up some liquid and use their hand muscles to control what is released and in what time. This aids with small muscle function teaching muscle movements like grasping.

Fine Motor Activities For Kids

There are a variety of fine motor activities for kids that allow them to develop their hand-eye coordination and other motor skills. Developing these motor skills is key to daily activities and being able to perform necessary functions. Activities like pinching, threading, beading, balancing, cutting, buttoning, sorting, tracing, and painting are all activities that exercise fine motor skills. With plenty of options, you can start utilising your children’s motor skills immediately. Fine motor activities can incorporate daily functions to allow children to become well versed in the action and eventually to have the independence to do it themselves.