What are fine motor skills? And how to improve them?
What are fine motor skills?
Fine motor skills involve the use of small muscles in our hands, wrists, fingers, feet and toes. Fine motor skills involve the movements of small muscles that require your child’s brain to coordinate between the action and what they are seeing. Fine motor skills can impact things like holding a fork to eat or using a pencil to write.
Fine motor skills start to develop when a child uses the smaller muscles in their hands, wrists, fingers, feet, and toes. Developing those muscles includes actions like grasping, holding, pressing, or using a pincer grip (holding something between the forefinger and thumb).
For young children of preschool, kindergarten and early school age, fine motor skill development is extremely important. For a fun way to improve your child’s motor skills when it’s rainy outside.
Why are fine motor skills important?
Fine motor skills are vital for doing everyday activities like buttoning up a shirt, using utensils to eat, tying shoelaces, cutting with scissors, and writing. As adults, we use fine motor skills so often in our daily lives that it’s easy to not realise that the task we are completing requires a certain skill set and the use of certain muscles.
If a young child is unable to do these everyday tasks, it can affect their self-confidence, ability to develop self-care and independence skills, and also their academic performance.
Below you’ll find 3 ways to improve your child’s fine motor skills. Once you have learned these 3 ways you can out those benefits here.
Build with blocks and Lego
Stack, connect and build things together with blocks and Lego. These activities encourage fine pushing and pulling movements. Lego is also great for fostering creativity. Building with LEGO is an effective way to work and develop your child’s fine motor skills. As children build and even pick up LEGO pieces they will, build stronger muscles in their hands and improve co-ordination, this will help them to improve with other skills, such as learning to hold a pencil and learning to write.
Other skills children can learn from playing with Lego include persistence, a sense of accomplishment and an improved ability to solve puzzles.
Puzzles
Do puzzles together. Picking up and moving puzzle pieces into place helps develop pincer grasp.
Watching or helping your child learn how to complete a puzzle can sometimes be frustrating, they can be impatient and give up easily, lose pieces or put them in their mouth. But if you stick with it the rewards are worth it. Engage with and encourage your child as much as you can to compete easy puzzles at first and then progressively harder one’s, doing this will improve their hand – eye skills, co-ordination, and motor skills.
Watching the smile and sense of satisfaction that your child will get from completing a puzzle provides tremendous satisfaction for parents.
Eye dropper tests
Put some water a few glasses. Pour a few drops of food colouring in each glass, so that you have different coloured water in each glass. Have a couple of empty bowls and glasses where kids can use an eye dropper to experiment with mixing different coloured water together. Try using vinegar instead of water, and have a bowl of bicarbonate soda that will fizz up when the coloured vinegar is dropped in.
These fine motor development skill activities are just some of the ways you may help your child to improve his/her motor skill. There are more activities you may do other than the once mentioned above for which the link has been provided
https://www.understood.org/articles/en/6-fine-motor-activities-for-young-kids
