August 29, 2020

Fine Motor Activities for Kids and Preschoolers: What Are Types of Motor Development?

Motor skills involve how smartly kids can use their hands. There are many kinds of motor skills activities which can be used for kids.

Fine Motor Activities for Preschoolers

Have you ever tried feeding your child with one finger? And he needs to pick the rest of the food with his fingers. You know picking and holding food is the first stage of holding a crayon.

#1. Playdough activity: Kids can mold the play dough any way they want. They can also stick various objects into it. These objects are wooden letters, pebbles, and candles. This activity shows their creativity of what they can do with play dough. They can also stick googly eyes, buttons, and coloured pasta. They can create a jungle out of playdough this way.

#2. Fingerprinting with edible clay: Kids can also be asked to leave fingerprints with their hands using edible colour. You can prepare this colour at home through a simple recipe involving corn flour, boiling water, cold water, and liquid food colour. Since kids have a habit to lick, these fingerprints should be edible.

You can also mix chocolate pudding mix with another pudding mix and create edible food paint of another kind. These fingerprints and paints created on paper take some time to dry up.

#1. Write on fairy dust – You can also use fairy dust and write on it. You can leave behind fingerprints or create letters on it. To create fairy dust (you can also get it from the market), you also need to mix table salt with liquid food colour.

The children can be taught the alphabet this way. They are supposed to write letters of their name onto this fairy dust. You can also teach numbers to your kids by drawing them out on this fairy dust.

It’s important to develop motor skills in children so that they can develop hand-eye coordination.

Fine Motor Activities for Toddlers

#1. Putting rice into one container from another – Once you want to teach your toddler to move rice from one container to another, you need scoops and different containers.

#2. Race patterns with buttons – You can also make sure that the kids place buttons on different patterns drawn on paper. This is a fun activity for kids. Kids enjoy placing the coloured buttons on the pattern. You can draw patterns like zig-zag and swirls on paper. You will need a marker pen to draw patterns on coloured cardboard paper.

Kids love colours, so make sure that you use various colour buttons for this activity. You can also put glue drops on a piece of paper. Your child can stick buttons against these glue drops. Instead of buttons, you can also use pebbles or pom-poms. Any object of equal size will be apt for this task.

#3. Putting plastic straws into cardboard tubes – You should cut the cardboard tubes into 10-15 cm long pieces. Then ask your kids to put plastic straws into these holes. It’s a good activity for strengthening the power of the hands of your kid. This activity makes sure that your kids have strong hands while writing.

#4. Scarves into a ball with holes – You can put scarves into the holes of a ball from one end and draw them out from another. Different coloured scarves can be used for this activity creating the illusion of a rainbow.

By the way, this kind of ball with holes is known as an Oball. Instead of putting scarves through holes, kids can also pull out the scarves from the Oball.

#5. Put the tail on the bunny – It is the most popular activity in which your kids learn how to stick a tail to a bunny. You can use pom poms as bunny tails. Then you can put Velcro on the bunny cutouts. Once that’s done, you can stick the pompom tails to bunnies.

Although Velcro is a self-adhesive, you can also use a glue gun on Velcro, while sticking tails to bunnies.

This activity can also be done without using Velcro. Ask your kids to match the pompoms with the correct bunny using the colour. They can place the same coloured pom pom on the bunny’s tail. In this activity, you can shoot a drop of adhesive or two, from the glue gun on the Velcro.

#6. Take off the tape from the table – You can paste some coloured electrical tape on the table. Then ask kids to peel it off. This can be a fun activity for them when they remove the tape layer by layer. They have to figure out which tape is on top of which tape.

#7. Bead balloons – For this activity, you need to put water beads in a bottle and add water to it. After that’s done, the water beads expand in size overnight. The next day, you push the water beads into a balloon through the bottle. Your son can have a fun time squeezing the water beads in the balloons.

Want to know more about types of motor development, click here