Building Fine Motor Skills Can be Fun for Your Child!
Fun Fine Motor Activities
Jewelry making: String various types of beads made of wood, clay, macaroni, buttons, cheerios, or Froot Loops on pipe cleaners, shoe laces, string, or licorice.
Resistive Materials: Play-doh, clay, or theraputty are great materials to provide resistance that helps to improve fine motor skills. Also, spraying water with a spray bottle provides resistance that helps improve fine motor abilities. For great play-doh ideas, check out the 40 Fine Motor Skills Activities - The Imagination Tree. Embedding favorite items in Theraputty and having your child dig them out is always a favorite, as is creating things with resistive clay.
Coloring and cutting: Use triangle crayons, Crayola Write Start Colored Pencils, or markers to color predrawn pictures. Cut Play-Doh, cardboard, putty (Silly Putty or Theraputty), straw, or paper.
Writing and Drawing: Use shaving cream, sand in a box top, vibrating pens, scented crayons/markers, or chalk on a sidewalk or driveway, to write and play. You can also have your child form letters, numbers, or words in the air or on your back, with you guessing what she wrote. Dot to dot designs, mazes, coloring books, or card creating are also great incentives for children to practice writing skills. Magna Doodle, Alex Draw Like a Pro, and Squiggle Wiggle Writer are great products to help motivate your child to write or draw. Weights slipped around a pencil or weighted wristbands are useful in helping your child “feel” his hand while writing increasing success. If your child has significant trouble with writing, writing tools utilized by occupational therapists can be found at http://therapro.com, http://therapyshoppe.com, or http://achievement-products.com, or http://store.schoolspecialty.com You can find writing tools, handwriting practice sheets that have raised lines or other qualities that assist the child, or slanted boards. Pencil grips are also helpful for some children; a sampler pack can be found at http://funandfunction.com
Engaging in arts and crafts: For preschoolers: Make paper-bag puppets, paper-plate fish, or any foam project where the child must glue on small pieces for eyes, scales, or decorations. Sticker book play is also great for preschoolers. For older children: Origami, model cars/boats, glitter, glue, yarn projects that utilize needles or a loom, woodworking, and braiding. Wikki Stix, pieces of string made stiff with wax can be formed into anything in your child’s imagination. Wikki Stix are great for kids of all ages to develop fine motor skills.
Picking up objects: Have the child pick up small objects such as pennies, marbles, or beans with either his hands or tongs and then place them in a bottle or box with a small opening, or a piggy bank. Games such as Feed the Froggy, and Pop the Pig, build fine motor skills and improve eye-hand coordination.
Cooking: Pouring, stirring, shaking, kneading, cutting, pressing, or measuring is great for fine motor development. One motivational task is to have the child take small pieces of chocolate or sprinkles and put them on top of cupcakes.
Pinching: Play clothespin games, or play with clay, clips, snaps, or Velcro. Have your child find money or small objects buried in Theraputty.
Playing games or puzzles: Play board games that require moving pieces around the board (e.g., Chutes and Ladders). Other games that are great for building fine motor skills are Lauri Toys Stringing Pegs and Pegboard Set, Geoboards, Lite Brite, Operation, Perfection, Super Safe Hammering Kit (Lakeshore Learning), Edushape Tricky Fingers (good for ages 4-5), and Kerplunk. Lacing puzzles/cards as well as regular puzzles are also helpful for these children. Wind-up toys require fine motor control to turn the key and help to develop this skill.
Constructional games: Build or copy designs using Legos, Knex, Tinker Toys, or Elenco Snap Circuits Junior.
Dressing. When teaching your child how to dress, Therapro also has a “dressing vest” which makes working on dressing skills fun. The dressing vest is a double-sided vest (one for boys and one for girls) and provides zipping, snapping, buttoning, overall clips, buckle, lacing, tying and Velcro skill practice.
