23 Mar Fine Motor Fun Facts!

As a parent of a preschooler, you may have heard that it is important for your child to develop their fine motor skills. If you are like most parents, you probably wondered…What are fine motor skills? Why are they significant? Or How can I support my child’s development at home?

Fine motor skills are necessary and form the building blocks that your child will need to accomplish daily tasks such as feeding themselves, buttoning their clothes, tying their shoes, opening containers, cutting with scissors and eventually, writing. Fine motor skills involve the use of the small muscles in the fingers, thumb, hand, and wrist. To acquire coordinated dexterity, children must exercise and strengthen those muscles; much like an athlete exercises and strengthens muscles to be proficient in a sport.

Before your child is ready to learn how to write or draw, they need to build their hand skills. Parents can help them to succeed by providing them with opportunities to explore and experiment with a variety of activities and materials. Below is a list of 20 fun, engaging and constructive activities that you can use to hone your child’s fine motor development at home.

• • Molding Play-Dough with hands or rolling pins
  • Shaping Play-Dough with cookie cutters, plasticware or pizza cutters
  • Removing pom poms, beads or candies from an ice cube tray, egg carton or muffin tin using tongs, tweezers or clothespins
  • Stringing beads, pasta or cereal on shoelaces, straws or pipe cleaners
  • Painting with brushes, sponges, q-tips or spray bottles
  • Building with blocks, Legos (and taking them apart) or dominos
  • Scooping and transferring sand, rice, beans or gravel
  • Using a dropper, syringe or pipette to transfer water from one container to another
  • Taking apart and putting together plastic eggs
  • Removing buttons and/or beads from clay
  • Stretching rubber bands and placing them around an empty paper towel roll or bottle
  • Attaching paper clips to make a chain
  • Screwing together nuts and bolts
  • Peeling stickers and placing them on paper
  • Make a collage by ripping pieces of paper and placing them on contact paper
  • Tracing patterns or shapes using vehicles, sidewalk chalk or fingers
  • Attaching colored chip clips or butterfly clips to matching paint sample chips
  • Finger painting with shaving cream
  • Pushing q-tips through a straw or cotton balls into a bottle
  • Pulling painter’s tape off of plastic cups, countertops or any other non-stick surface

The best way to immerse your child in these kinds of activities is to enroll them in a preschool, then reinforce what they are learning with complementary alternatives at home.

Learning Cube Academy in Plano, TX offers a full stratagem for building fine motor skills in our curriculum, including handwriting instruction (when children are ready) and additional child care programs. Call us to schedule your tour today – (972) 905-5994.