How to Develop Your Child's Fine Motor Skills

As parents, it is common to hear the term ‘’fine motor skills’’ so I thought I’d write a blog post about what fine motor skills in children’s development are and how your can help your child develop theirs.

What are Fine Motor Skills?

Fine Motor Skills encapsulate movements of the smaller muscle groups in your child’s fingers, wrists and hands.  Young children need time to practice using these skills in order to help them develop. As your child grows, these skills will show their importance as they are needed for many everyday tasks such as:

Grasping a pencil, tying shoe laces, using cutlery, cutting with scissors, buttoning clothing, brushing teeth etc. 

As well as helping children accomplish the above tasks, developing Fine Motor Skills can also increate hand-eye co-ordination, develop finger control and help children learn how to manipulate objects such as Play dough.

How Can I Help My Child Improve Their Fine Motor Skills?

There are many ways you can help your child develop their Fine Motor Skills from as young as 1 year old. Here are some of the examples aimed at a range of age groups and abilities:

• Finger paint - Encourage your child to use their fingers to paint pictures, shapes, numbers etc .
• Tweezers – Use tweezers to pick up light objects and place them in sorting cups (watch closely for choking hazards.)
• Crayons, pencil, chalk - Use any of these to draw, write or scribble.
• Building blocks – build and stack building blocks. See how high they can go, push them down and rebuild them.
• Containers – open and close lids of containers
• Stacking Toys – stack items on top of each other and learn about size and shape whilst also developing those fine motor skills
• Shape Sorter – place different shapes in to a sorter
• Lacing – weave laces through holes or thread beads on to laces.