5 ways to Help Your Child Develop their Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills are an important component of key tasks, such as tying shoelaces, doing up buttons, handing cutlery or controlling a pencil. Essentially, anything that involves the small muscles in the hands and fingers requires fine motor skills. With that said, it’s important for parents to try and find ways to help their children develop these skills, so I have teamed up with a prep school in Milton Keynes to offer some suggestions.

“This post is a partnered post and may contain affiliate links. These thoughts and opinions are in line with my own personal beliefs.”

How to Develop Fine Motor Skills

Arts & Crafts

Using paintbrushes, colouring in, and cutting with age-appropriate scissors are all activities that can help strengthen the fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.

With that said, why not set up a crafting station in your house that allow your child to practise. If you’re worried about the mess, you could do this outside on a warmer day so that your furniture doesn’t get ruined.

These art and craft activities are a perfect way to develop fine motor skills.

Scribbling with crayons.
Using a paintbrush will help to enhance hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity.
Introduce your child to modelling clay or play dough to strengthen their muscles.
Cutting with scissors.

All these activities will help to build up your child’s hand and finger muscles.

Water Play

Encourage your child to play with sponges in the bath, because the squeezing motion helps strengthen their hands and forearms. Alternatively, you could fill up a bowl with water.

The act of pouring water from one cup to another is also great for helping them develop their fine motor skills because they must learn to have a steady hand.

Gardening

Digging, planting seeds, caring for wildlife and other gardening activities are not only great ways to help your child develop their fine motor skills, but they’re also a way of encouraging them to put down their digital devices, get muddy knees and get some fresh air.

Board Games, Puzzles and Lego

Lots of board games and puzzles require fine motor skills because they involve moving little delicate items around. Operation is one example of this, because it involves delicate movement of the hands and fingers.

Plus, these games and jigsaws can be a fun way to keep your kids entertained and learn various other skills at the same time, such as teamwork and problem solving.

Lego or Duplo construction play is also a greta way to practice that hand eye co-ordination.

Threading and Sensory Play

Playing with lego, threading activities, and dried rice pouring are all activities to keep those little hands busy.

A simple one for very young children is putting dried spaghetti into a colander or threading cheerios onto a pipe cleaner.

I hope that these 5 ways to help your child develop their fine motor skills are helpful. Please do share in the comments box below any activities you have tried that have helped your child.