Author: Varsha Biyani | March 17th, 2022
Fine Motor Activities For Preschoolers
Fine motor skills involve the use of small muscles that control the hand, fingers and thumbs. They help children perform important tasks such as feeding themselves, grasping objects, zipping and buttoning their clothes, tying shoelaces, cutting with scissors and writing. These all help the child to build independence in self-care thus boosting their confidence and self-esteem.
It’s important to work with children from a very young age to help develop good fine motor skills, they improve with practice, so the earlier you start the better!
These 5 fun activities are great to build fine motor skills in young children and preschoolers.
1. Playdough or Clay: Pinching, squeezing, poking, rolling and squishing Playdough or clay is great for strengthening hand muscles to prepare children for writing and other skills that require fine motor development.
Encourage your child to squeeze, stretch, pinch and roll. Make snakes, worms, animals or pretend food. You can even have your child try to cut the Playdough with child-safe scissors.
2. Paper Play: Tearing and crumpling up different types of paper. Ripping and tearing papers helps fingers to develop the arches of the hand as well as finger strength. Encourage your child to tear coloured paper or magazine pages into small pieces, then make a collage. Talk about the colours and shapes you create together.
3. Building Blocks: Block play is another excellent open-ended play resource that offers many opportunities for the development of a child’s eye-hand coordination and hand manipulation skills. Children use their imagination and express their creativity when constructing as they are free to follow through on their ideas. Build tall towers, colour co-ordinate, make bridges, knock them down and rebuild.
4. Tongs and Tweezers: This can be a fun activity to help develop prehension and increase the strength of fingers. It also helps the child to learn to grade the pressure applied while holding the tongs. Use a variety of everyday objects or food items of different sizes and textures.
5. Awesome Art: Drawing is something that children love doing and should be doing every day. Practice drawings using a range of mediums such as crayons, felt tip pens, chunky chalk for drawing on pavements, coloured pencils and of course paint. Finger painting or brush painting, mixing colours and free expression works best. Toddlers and younger children will start off holding these drawing tools by grasping them in their hands. Eventually, they will move on to holding them using their tripod grip which is essential for being able to write.
All these activities develop fine motor skills, they also encourage creativity and self-expression. They are a great way to stimulate the creativity of your child. These activities help to develop hand manipulations for writing and other fine motor activities. Have fun while preparing your child for preschool and school activities.