Why is fine motor skills important

The Importance of Fine Motor Skills for Preschoolers

6/20/2021

The Importance of Fine Motor Skills for Preschoolers

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Developing fine motor skills helps your children to perform important tasks such as feeding themselves, writing, zipping clothes, and more. This article will give insights to parents about the importance of fine motor skills, what fine motor milestones children hit at various stages, and provide activities to strengthen this learning domain at home.

Grabbing Fingers and Toes: Why Are Fine Motor Skills Important?

Fine motor activity involves the use of small muscles that control the hand, fingers, and thumbs. Fine motor skills help children perform important tasks such as feeding themselves, grasping objects, and writing. The ability to accomplish self-care and everyday tasks by using fine motor skills helps a child’s self-esteem and confidence grow.

It’s important to work with children early on to help fine motor skills develop at a young age. Fine motor skills improve with practice, so the earlier the better!

Children who struggle with fine motor tasks become frustrated and upset if they cannot complete everyday tasks. As an example, a child might have a hard time holding scissors and cutting across a dotted line. This might cause them to feel frustrated and discouraged and to avoid cutting exercises since they feel like it’s too difficult for them. You can help them work up to it by starting some of the below activities early.

Fine Motor Skills Milestones by Age

A reminder to parents: your child’s development path is unique. Teachers at Vivvi partner with families to support each child’s appropriate pace, and we always encourage you to reach out to our pediatrician if you have concerns.

0 – 6 Months

Most babies will have a reflexive grasp at birth and around three months of age, they will start to reach for objects. They will also start to develop their voluntary grasp and 2 handed palmar grasps. At 5 months, they are typically demonstrating a 1 handed palmar grasp and at 6 months developing a controlled reach.

6 – 12 Months

From 6 to 12 months, most infants will start to reach and grasp for objects to put in their mouth, and will start to develop the ability to control their release of objects they are holding. They will also develop a pincer grasp and pick things up with this grasp (thumb and one finger). They will also be able to transfer an object from one hand to the other and be able to drop and pick up their toys.

12 – 24 Months

At 12 to 24 months of age, most children are interested in stacking using building blocks. They will also be working on being able to put rings on a stick, place pegs onto a pegboard, and turn pages a few at a time. They can also start to scribble, paint using their whole arm movement, shifting their hands and making strokes, and self-feed with little to no assistance.

Twos

Around the age of two, toddlers can start to string large beads, turn single pages, snip using scissors and hold crayons using their thumb and fingers (instead of their fist). They will also be able to use one hand consistently during most activities, and start to paint using their wrists, making dots, lines, and circular strokes. Your toddler will also be able to eat reliably with no assistance.

Threes

At three years old, your toddler will be able to build taller towers out of building blocks and manipulate clay materials by rolling them into balls, making snakes or cookies. You might also notice that they are starting to use their non-dominant hand to assist and stabilize the other when using objects.

Fours

At age four, most children will be able to continuously cut along the dotted lines on pieces of paper. They will be able to copy a cross or square shape while drawing and be able to write their name and numbers 1 to 5. They can copy letters and their handedness will be well established. They will also start to be able to get dressed all by themselves.

Best Activities to Strengthen Fine Motor Skills for Preschoolers

Here are some ideas of great activities you can do at home to help build your child’s fine motor skills. These activities are fun, engaging and they can help your child get over the frustrated bump of giving up.

Playdough

Everyone knows that play dough is extremely popular with young children, and it can be a great toy for strengthening fine motor skills. Playdough is a malleable material that makes it fun for toddlers to investigate, and while they do so they build up strength in their small muscles and tendons, preparing them for other activities in the future such as handling scissors.

Threading Beads

Threading is another great activity for your child to build up their fine motor skills. By having your child thread beads onto some pipe cleaners, they will use their concentration, thinking skills, and a pincer-like grasp which will help them be able to grip a pencil later on. Using pipe cleaners rather than a string is great for younger children age 2 and up, as it is easier to hold than string and you can twist and shape it during the threading which can be even more interesting for your little one.

Weaving Hearts

Using yarn and cardboard can introduce your little one to the concept of sewing and weaving. Cut out fun shapes, like hearts, out of cardboard with a space in the middle so that your toddler can weave yarn through. It’s a great way for them to strengthen their hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills and it makes for great decoration.

At Vivvi, we believe in an inquiry-based learning model that helps children grow through interacting with the world around them. By engaging in activities that include sensory play, scientific inquiry, literacy, and more, children will develop the skills they need to progress in kindergarten and beyond. You can learn more about milestones and our domains of learning on our website.

The Importance of Fine Motor Skills in Early Childhood

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As parents, you play a critical role in your child’s fine motor skill development. The most important thing you can do is to provide opportunities that are fun and interactive for your child. Developing fine motor skills in early childhood education helps build the foundation for important future skills like writing and self-care. In this article we’ll walk you through the importance of fine motor skills and what you can do to help your child build them.

Importance of Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills involve the use of the small muscles that control the hand, fingers, and thumb. They help children perform important tasks like feeding themselves, grasping toys, buttoning and zipping clothes, writing, drawing, and more. The ability to complete self-care and every day tasks helps a child’s self esteem and confidence to increase.

It’s important to start working with children on building their fine motor skills early on. Fine motor skills will develop and improve as they move through childhood. It just takes the right kind of practice.

Some children may struggle with performing tasks that use their fine motor skills. This can cause them to become frustrated and upset when they can’t complete every day tasks. For example, a child may have a difficult time holding scissors and cutting along a dotted line. This could cause them to be frustrated at the task and avoid cutting exercises because they feel it’s too difficult.

We’ll show you some great activities to help build your child’s fine motor skills that are fun, engaging, and can help get children over the frustrated bump of giving up.

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Activities to Develop Fine Motor Skills

Academic Activities

Coloring / Drawing
Cutting
Tracing
Writing
Using Glass Jewels
Activities with Snap Cubes
Play Dough Activities
Sorting Pom Poms / Objects with Play Tweezers

Free Play Activities

Building with Legos and Blocks
Puzzles
Dressing Dolls
Playing Games like Operation and Lite-Brite
Beading Necklaces
Drawing with Sidewalk Chalk
Playing with Play Dough

Self-Care Activities

Tying Shoes
Buttoning and Zipping Shirts and Jackets
Eating and Cutting Food
Brushing Hair and Teeth
Using the Toilet

Fine motor skills gradually build for children as they do activities to help strengthen their muscles and coordination. Make sure to keep the fine motor activities fun and change it up for your child! The more they want to play and explore with activities that build their fine motor skills, the more precise their movements will be.

Letter Recognition Activities The Importance of Hands-on Learning Activities for Kids

Why it is important to develop fine motor skills in children

In ancient times, the Chinese noted that active work with fingers affects the development of the brain. Writing, drawing, lacing shoes, fastening buttons - all these actions involve the precise work of the fingers, which must be learned from early childhood.

Fine motor skills is the ability to perform precise and small movements with the fingers, thanks to the coordinated actions of the skeletal, nervous and muscular systems of the body. Compiling constructors, puzzles, mosaics, children train fine motor skills of their hands and develop the most important skills.

The development of fine motor skills of the hands is associated with the development of cognitive processes: memory, attention, coordination of movements. Experts note that it is the fine motor skills of the hands that are responsible for the development of speech and the clarity of sounds. If it is well developed, already in kindergarten children will speak clearly, and in the first grade there will be no problems with writing. It is necessary to train fine motor skills of hands from early childhood with the help of toys.

What toys to buy for the development of fine motor skills of hands

Toys help kids to explore the world and develop harmoniously. Mosaics, puzzles, constructors, sorters - all these toys will help to train the fine motor skills of the baby's hands every day. But the toy should be not only useful, but also safe! Small parts can harm a one-year-old baby. At this age, the teeth are actively cut in the crumbs and the constant itching in the gums provokes the baby to take everything in his mouth.

"My first mosaic" - an educational toy for children from one year old. Large toy chips are safe for young explorers. The set includes 10 color drawings, a transparent planchette with holes and 54 chips in five different colors. The child will make chips according to the pattern, train fine motor skills of hands, attention and analyze colors in order to match similar shades. Thanks to various drawings, this toy will hold the attention of the child for a long time, because each time there will be a new image in front of the child.

Educational toy "Baby puzzles" are puzzles for the little ones. From different details, the child must make a complete picture. Each element of the puzzle has a small, neat handle to make it easy to fold the picture. This toy will not only develop fine motor skills of hands, but also logical thinking, observation. When the baby learns to make a puzzle on his own, it can be hung on the wall, as a significant achievement of the crumbs.

"Puzzle game" can be played by children who have just learned to sit up on their own. The parts of the toy are streamlined, large and safe. 20 colored chips can be stacked on a tablet, or on top of each other. So the child will develop logical thinking and spatial imagination.

"Educational cube" sorter toy - will develop and entertain the child. 18 multi-colored figures in the form of various geometric shapes, 6 plates with holes of various shapes

Once used to develop fine motor skills in the hands of various cereals, which are often swallowed by babies, today parents can develop the most important skills of children with quality toys and not worry about their safety.0003

Buy safe educational toys online with fast delivery!

Why it is necessary to develop fine motor skills of hands Consultation for parents

Consultation for parents “Why it is necessary to develop fine motor skills of hands”

Khakimova T.F. Neuroscientists and psychologists who study the brain and mental development of children have long proven the connection between fine motor skills of the hand and the development of speech. Children who have better developed fine hand movements have a more developed brain, especially those parts of it that are responsible for speech. In other words, the better the baby's fingers are developed, the easier it will be for him to master speech.

Therefore, it is very important to develop fine motor skills in a child from an early age. But just doing the exercises will be boring for the baby - you need to turn them into interesting and useful games.

Fine motor skills of hands are a variety of movements with fingers and palms. Gross motor skills - movements with the whole hand and the whole body.

Along with the development of fine motor skills, your baby's memory, attention and vocabulary develop.

Today, the majority of modern children have a general motor lag, especially in urban children. Remember, now even kindergartens are asked to bring Velcro shoes so that educators do not take the trouble to teach a child to tie shoelaces. Even 20 years ago, parents, and with them children, had to do more with their hands: sort out cereals, wash clothes, knit, embroider. Now there is a car for every lesson. The consequence of poor development of general motor skills, and in particular - hands, the general unpreparedness of most modern children for writing or problems with speech development. The relationship between the development of fine hand movements and speech was noticed back in the last century by Maria Montessori, and before her by Seguin, that is, it can be concluded that if speech is not all right, these are probably problems with motor skills.

However, even if the child's speech is normal, this does not mean at all that the child is good at managing his own hands. If at the age of 4-5 years, tying shoelaces causes difficulties for a child, and nothing is molded from plasticine except for balls and sausages, if at 6 years old sewing on a real button is an impossible and dangerous task, then your child is no exception.

Parents must understand that in order to interest the child and help him master new information, you need to turn learning into a game, do not retreat if the tasks seem difficult, do not forget to praise the child.

Unfortunately, most parents learn about problems with coordination and fine motor skills only before school. This turns into a forced load on the child: in addition to assimilating new information, one also has to learn to hold a pencil in naughty fingers. What to do if insufficiently good development of fine motor skills was found? First , you need to be patient and gradually, step by step, correct this shortcoming. And, secondly , to develop the hand not from time to time, but systematically, every day. Especially a lot has been said about this lately, creating entire systems and manuals. But you can make everything much easier!

Knead dough, clay, plasticine with your fingers, sculpt something.
String beads, buttons on threads.
Tie knots on thick and thin ropes, shoelaces.
Start an alarm clock, toys with a key.
Hatching, drawing, coloring with a pencil, crayons, paints.
Cut with scissors (preferably small) .
Design from paper ("origami") , sew, embroider, knit.
Draw patterns by cells in a notebook.
Practice on home apparatus where a finger grip is required (rings, bar) .
Clap your hands softly, loudly, at different tempos.
Roll small beads, pebbles, balls in turn with each finger.
Do finger exercises

You can use your child's normal activities for this. Watch your child wash and dry their hands. Teach him to wash each finger thoroughly, and then also dry it thoroughly with a towel, massaging each phalanx well.

If you have a dacha and a plot of land, take advantage of this and involve your child in picking berries. When you cook, for example, dumplings or ravioli, let the child sculpt them with you, the benefits will be unconditional. The ability to thread a needle is very useful - try it, hit it the first time, because the hole is so small, and the thread is so naughty!

It is good if a child learns to tie shoelaces on his own, weave braids from hair (this, of course, is more suitable for girls) , fasten and unfasten buttons, even the tightest ones. All this makes the fingers act deftly and will be very useful in the future.

Of course, there are special games and exercises for developing fine motor skills of the hand. Some of them have been known to you for a long time. Remember the game in the shadow, when, building combinations of fingers, you can show various shadow figures - a dog, a bunny, a deer, a little man. This game is just what you need. Surely you remember another common game: several small objects are hidden on the table under a napkin, the child must determine by touch what kind of object it is.

In children's magazines now you can find a lot of entertaining - educational tasks, for example, when you need to connect the dots and see what kind of drawing you get. Tasks of the same type include various labyrinths, drawing pictures, coloring pictures, etc. It is important to teach the child to strive to do everything carefully. If he does not do well, do not scold him, rush him. On the contrary, he should be constantly encouraged and instilled in him the confidence that he will succeed.