Properly Developed Fine Motor Skills Are Important To Every Day Living
What Activities do we do to improve fine motor skills?
Toddlers are sensualists above all else — they love to smell, taste, and touch. If you give your child plenty of fun-to-feel materials to keep her little hands busy, they will have a great time developing their strength and agility.
Nontoxic Homemade Play dough: Yes, we make our own play dough with no chemicals. Play dough invites hand and finger movement as your child rolls, shapes, punches, and molds the material to her liking. A few simple tools, such as a lightweight rolling pin and some plastic cookie cutters, stretch this activity out longer. The softer the dough, the easier it is for small hands to shape.
Sand play: this creates opportunities to use those same manipulative skills. As toddlers mold shapes and pour sand in bucket, they won't even realize their honing their fine motor skills…
Emptying and filling: emptying a container requires a lot less precision than filling one. We use colored water (food color) to make it more fun and kids learn the colors at the same time. We also use various beans or pasta, great to encourage pinching…
Blocks stacking and Puzzling: Taking blocks out of a large box, pegs out of a pegboard, toys out of a trunk, and sturdy puzzle pieces out of a puzzle will keep your toddler busy! Then putting all back and using little fingers to manipulate all those pieces.
Watering plants: we use small spray bottles so kids can learn how to hold it and squeeze it to spray water, they love this because they get refreshed at the same time, and don’t even notice their little hands working so hard!
“Writing” and scribbling: Sometime between the ages of 12 and 18 months, kids will probably attempt to "write" by making marks on paper, and sometime between 18 and 24 months they may surprise you by drawing vertical and horizontal lines and perhaps a circle.
Drawing with a crayon involves fine motor skills such as grasping and holding, for instance, as well as boosting your child's visual acumen and tapping her imagination.
Coloring: Pencils, markers, chunky chalk to use outdoors, are the common tools kids can hold and start to draw and color on coloring pages at their level.
Painting: Painting can be done with brushes, rolls, vegetables, sponges and more fun materials as fingers! While learning how to hold and manipulate an implement is important, finger-painting gives your toddler's fine motor skills and creativity a workout, too. Hand- and footprints on paper makes kids so happy. We also use the nature as brush leaves, acorns, carrot-tops, or flower petals with paint to use as homemade stamps…
Pasting: We use children glue sticks to be applied on paper or stickers
Tearing: Toddlers love tearing paper in pieces. It requires a little bit of strength so it is very good indeed to develop their fine-motor skills!
Beading and lacing: we have plenty of very nice children wooden toys to introduce beading and lacing.
Zip /unzip, button/unbutton, tying laces: Unique soft boards covered with fluffy fabric specially made for our Club invite children to practice those skills. They have great colors and are so smooth to touch that kids love playing with it.
