improve children fine motor skill

  Are you wondering how you can make best use of this lock down (due to covid 19) , as you no longer need to wake up early to go to work and am sure you have thoughts like ‘’how can i improve my children skill’’ i can’t just let them watch cartoon all day long, even though blippi is educative must i just let them watch it all through the day , and you have been thinking hmm ‘what do i have them do ‘.

 Well , i am here with tips  for you , let make your little blooms blossom through play with the aim of developing their fine motor skill

 

In this article we will be discussing ;  

 

•  Definition of fine motor skill 
• Important  of fine motor skill  activities in early children’s development  
•  Activities that  can improve  children fine motor skills

 

Ok lets begins

 

 What is fine motor skill?

Fine motor skill refer to the coordination between small muscles, like those of the hands and fingers, with the eye

Being able to color with crayons, cut with scissors, paint with a paintbrush and play with small objects such as lego, beads and puzzle are all due to the coordination of the small muscles in the hands and fingers. If these muscles  are not properly or accurately coordinated it is going to affect your children’s development as they will struggle to keep up with their peers in these activities which will lead to frustration and low self esteem. In other words you need to encourage your children with fine motor skill activities so they can have good control of their hand muscles which will enable them  to learn handwriting with minimal effort once formal schooling starts

 

     Important of fine motor activity

•  Improves self esteem ; As children grow in their fine motor skills their self esteem grows, building confidence and self-esteem can help children realize the influence they can have in  the society.  

 

• Strengthens  hand muscle; fine motor skills activities  help to improve control of hand muscles which enable brilliant hand writing with minimal effort, activities such as cutting help  strengthen children’s muscles. They can manipulate the way a scissor cuts paper by turning their hand or wrist a certain way.

 

• Hand-eye coordination ; children hand eye coordination improves as their fine motor skill improves, children are able to knot their shoe , ride a bicycle ,wash their hair , kick a ball at a goal post, know the right leg of shoe from the left .

 

• Independent;  fine motor skill activities enable children to do things themselves, things like  bathing,  wiping their bottom after using the toilet, washing their  own hands properly.  Brushing their own hair, teeth, and dressing up themselves. 

 

   Activities that can  improves children  fine         motor  skills

 You can improve your child’s motors skills through the following activities ; 

• Drawing and coloring

All you need to do is provide your children with a drawing sheet  and with coloring pencils to draw and color whatever they want, its more fun when you do this with them

 

 

• Painting

  for this activity you need to provide paint of different colors which would make it more fun, paint brush and a sheet or a display board sheet  of paper to paint as most children love painting, ensure they put on an apron as this would be messy.

 

 

 

• Threading Beads

this can be done with various materials such as pipe cleaners, drinking straws or threads, and beads. children love this as they can make necklace and earrings from  it

 

 

 

 

• Cutting papers with children scissors

    To make this activity more fun  and easy for the children ,tape  a part of the sheet of papers on the table and provide them with scissors to cut ,even though they are using the children scissors for this activity  it still requires close supervision.

 

• Sorting pom pom with tweezers

for this activity two materials are needed: pom pom and tweezers. you can provide your children with different colors of pom pom to sort.They could identify the colors and as well count.

 

• Puzzles

 puzzling builds the self confidence of a child as they achieve a set goal of fixing the puzzle. All that is required for this activity  is the puzzle. its will be great if you sit with them to guide and interact with them thus  not only developing their fine motor skill but building their  social skill 

 

• Counting keys

 provide colorful plastic keys with a bowl having glued numbers and let them count and place the keys on the numbers.

 

• Train set

 make available train sets whether plastic or wooden whichever one your children loves  on a  mat  or carpets and allow them push the trains on the tracks. Train set not only builds children fine motor skill but also develop their interaction and communication skills

 

• Building with blocks and lego

 All that is required are blocks or lego,  with lego bricks or blocks  children can build lot of things such as a house, cars, castle, an aeroplane , giraffe farm , sofa and lots more

 

 

• Cutting  fruits with plastic knife

provide your children with fruit they love,let them wash it and make them sit on the chair with the fruit on a table in their front and give them a plastic knife to cut and design ,you can choose to design the fruits into caterpillars ,trees, scarecrows, bunnies…

 

• Playing with play dough

 This is another fun fine motor skill activities, provide  the children with  play dough, play dough cutters, and every other things that can  make it more fun and creative  such as pasta as they can poke the play dough with the pasta, or candles as they could make the play dough into a  birthday cake or googly eyes and feathers to make  play dough monsters.  Its more fun if you make the play dough with your children check my article on “are you bored! Then let’s make a play dough’’ to know more about how you can  make play dough.

 

 

• Breaking ices block with a play hammer

 Prior to this  activity, you need to put some water in different little containers and feeze it, you can make it colorful  and more fun by adding colors  or sea creatures or whatever you prefer  to the water before freezing .when it  iced, place it on the table or a messy area and let them break it using the hammer,you could also make them carry out an experiment like a little scientist by pouring some salt over the ice and see how fast it melt .

 

• Water play using a sponge 

For this activities you need two containers, one filled with water and the other one empty, give your children some sponge and let them deep it into the water container and sweeze it into the empty one, its will be fun if you do this with them as you can make it into a race and reward the fastest

 

• Rice race 

this is also more like the water play with sponge,the difference is that you are using rice, am sure you could spare some rice for this , make available two container with rice in one and the other one empty, provide your child with a spoon and let them scoop the rice into the spoon and pour it into the empty container,you could turn this into a counting activity as to know  how many spoonful of rice would fill up the empty container,  also they could compete to know who is the fastest in filling up the empty containers.

 I hope you would enjoy all of my ideas, best of luck having fun.

 

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