What is Fine Motor Skills?

Hope all of you know what Fine Motor skills are! Okay if not, it is the ability to use the mussels that control the movement of fingers, thumb and hand, in co-ordination with the eyes.

By preschool age, a child normally will be able to these simple tasks by themselves:

• button up a shirt
• using a pencil or a crayon
• paste objects
• pick blocks and stack them
• use of a scissors
• cut pieces of paper into small pieces
• tie a shoe lace
• pour water from a jug to a cup
• the use of cutlery

More skills are continuously developed into later years. Now how can we develop these skills? There is a lot of activities one can do and encourage the child to do. With a little bit of planning of different activities you can help them along.

Some activities that I would recommend is firstly simple every day things that we do around the house, such as:

• engaging in household chores
• gardening
• watering plants
• cooking

These give a great workout to hand muscles and eye co-ordination.You should also encourage activities that they like doing as obviously it will be more enjoyable.

During the infant and toddler years, children develop basic grasping and manipulation skills, which are refined during the preschool years. The preschooler becomes quite adept in self-help, construction, holding grips, and bimanual control tasks requiring the use of both hands.

— Essa, E., Young, R. & Lehne, L., Introduction to early childhood education, 2nd Ed. (1998)

So try introducing lot of activities like Lacing, Blocks, Cutting  and Interactive Games etc in their early years itself.

Don't get confused by GROSS MOTOR SKILLS. Gross motor skills are larger movements your baby makes with his arms, legs, or feet, or his entire body. So crawling, running and jumping etc. are gross motor skills. 

For some beautiful ideas for Fine Motor Skills which I followed since Medha is 1.5 years, read here. For the activities in my blog for FINE MOTOR SKILLS are here

Happy Parenting :)