5 Activities focused on Motor Skills Development
One of the key areas of development is motor skills—or use of the hands.
Watching how children use their hands, what grips they are comfortable with and how they use their body.
Just as gross motor skills enable your child to perform important everyday tasks, such as putting on their socks, opening the toothpaste, fine motor abilities allow for increasing independence in smaller but equally significant matters. Development of fine motor skills helps children to zip up their coats, button their pants and use a scissors.
When you combine gross and fine motor skills with increasing hand-eye coordination new doors and challenges are created for children to explore and enjoy.
Here are five activities I think help to promote the development of fine and gross motor skills:
1) Stacking & Balancing Blocks.
Learning how to carefully place a block on top of another one requires great patience and determination for a child. They need to firstly grip the block securely and then assess where is the best place to place the block so it will not fall.
2) Pencil Grip
Children need to refine their motor skills so they can begin to learn how to grasp and use a pencil. This means understanding how to hold an object tightly while also manipulating the object, so it does what you want. In the case of the Super Blocks children need to not only grasp the pieces tightly they also need to move the block into place, so it fits on top of the other block.
3) Pincer Grip
These small blocks are perfect for children working on their pincer grip. The small pieces encourage children to develop this grip as they can only lift the blocks with their thumb and index finger. If they lift the blocks with their hand, they will quickly learn that is hard for them to place the block down safely without dropping it.
4) Twisting
When children need to twist and manipulate objects into place they are combining and using all the motor skills they have learned so far and using them all together. Twisting and manipulating helps children to build on the skills they already have.
5) Motor Skills and hand eye coordination
Clicks allows children to combine their developing motor skills and their hand eye coordination as they need to click the pieces into place in order to create their own design. The child must use everything they have learned and focus their eyes in order to get the pieces into place.
When it comes to developing motor, skills let your child lead they way. Allow them to work with the hand they favour and your only job is to watch from the side-lines and provide support and encouragement when needed.
