Fine motor skill means using hands small muscles from simple to complex activities. This is a foundation for pre writing skill development. Some examples of fine motor skills are buttoning & unbuttoning, cutting with scissors, pasting papers, drawing, coloring, painting, play dough and sand play, beading, etc. Below are some of the fine motor activities you can do it with your kids at home.
1. Coffee stir sticks or Popsicle sticks push – I made a hole on the cardboard box about the size to insert a stick. Each colored holes are in different direction to make child use their finger for various angle positions. This activity will also help kids to learn colors and the beginning sounds of the color (e.g., I have written ‘O’ next to orange, so while inserting orange stick we should teach kid to say the phonic of ‘O’ orange.)
2. Juice & Squeezing – Making lemon juice involves a lot of finger work. Cutting (with plastic knife), Squeezing, pouring and stirring helps to strengthen fingers. Kids do naturally love to involve in a lot of kitchen related work. Allow kids to perform safe kitchen tasks like vegetable cleaning, arranging, pouring, etc.
3. Filling water using syringe – I have given my kid different type of syringes (bulb, eye drop and oral syringes) to fill water in a cup. This will strengthen kids’ fingers. To make it even more fun I had given natural colored water (beet root for maroon and turmeric for yellow).
4. Beading – Helps to make variety of hand movements and improves hand eye coordination. First she arranged all the beads in group of various colors and started to bead. Start with big beads then gradually decrease the size of beads and string type.
Click this video below to watch more about fine motor skills
Tracing practice
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