Helping Your Child with their Fine Motor Skills

From as early as around 6 to 12 months old your child will start to reach, grasp, and put objects in their mouth. This requires fine motor skills which are the skills that allow us to coordinate movement in the smaller muscles of the body (typically found in the hands, wrists, and toes). There are ways in which you can help your child in this journey. You can help them to build on their fine motor skills through play that allows for practice. A nursery in Islington shares a few examples of this below.

Rice Race

There’s nothing particularly fancy that you will need to help your child with their fine motor skills. You can use mundane, everyday objects and food like rice. Using uncooked grains and bowls to transfer them from one to another, you can have a competition to see who can do it the fastest and encourage them to practise their picking.

Bubble Wrap

You can even use left-over bubble wrap. It’s fun to pop and helps children to press and squeeze.

Bath Toys

Squeezy rubber ducks and other bath toys promote the growth of these skills too while keeping them entertained.

Music

Playing musical instruments requires coordination in the hands and sometimes feet. Activities like drumming will help your child to hold, grip and pincer while helping them to explore their creativity and imagination.

Drawing and Painting

If you want to stay down the creative route, you can also look at making art with your child. Things like drawing and painting involve holding, gripping and hand-eye coordination. Just be sure to opt for child-safe, non-toxic paints and protect all of your lovely furnishings beforehand.

Weaving

Scrap bits of paper can also be used to create a weaved pattern. You’ll need to align a variety of them both horizontally and vertically for them to feed each through the next. Once all done, they will have something cool that they can use to create a basket.

This is a collaborative post.