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Find out how fine motor activities for preschoolers are designed to help little children in grasping, manipulating, and developing hand-eye coordination.
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Create the right play environment You can help children develop motor skills by providing an environment, experiences and activities that encourage a coordinated approach to overall physical development. It is also essential to ensure that the activities to improve fine motor skills create rich and varied opportunities for large and small movements. Make sure that your child is supported during the process of developing her fine and gross motor skills. When your child faces difficulties, encourage her by making changes to the materials she uses or modifying the activities. Ensure that you are constantly and gently giving praise and encouragement.
Establishing & building a framework While fine & gross motor skills develop naturally from birth, you can aid and accelerate this process through constant practice and play. Participating in activities that involve lacing, stacking and squeezing will help to support this developmental area whilst children can also have fun. There are a number of other games and physical activities that are ideal for developing fine motor skills. Playing with pegs, building blocks, putting shapes into appropriate slots and clay modelling, lend themselves well to strengthening hand muscles and improving hand-eye coordination.
Helping develop fine motor skills at home When it comes to fine motor skills, most of your child’s development will happen naturally as they learn and play. But you can help your child improve these skills by carefully choosing the right games and activities to improve fine motor skills. For instance, you can invite your child to help you in the kitchen and around the home. Help knead the dough, pour their own milk, set the table, and help clean up their room. You can also let them practice their fine motor skills by using tongs to turn a pancake, or practice putting rubber bands around a can.
Enjoy playing with dough for hours Using play dough to play is such a useful activity for improving fine motor skills. You can make playdough at home in a range of colours and different scents can be added to create an excellent sensory experience for your child. To create excitement and maintain interest, your child can mold play dough in time to music and get her to perform different actions such as pinching, rolling, flattening, and pressing each individual finger into the dough.
Enjoy playing with dough for hours Playdough is a soft and flexible sculpting medium, perfect for mess-free creative play. Its granular texture also makes it ideal for sensory play, and whenever it shows signs of drying out, just spray a little water on it, start to knead, and it is ready to be used again and again! Squeezing, squashing, rolling, and manipulating it to form shapes, strengthens the key muscles of little hands and fingers, and improves coordination required to perform precise movements that will be needed to help in gripping a pencil and writing.
Fishing for alphabet & numbers This fishing for magnetic letters and numbers is a perfect learning activity that ensures maintaining high interest levels and improves focus. Your little one will have great fun singing, recognizing, and counting as she catches and fishes them out one by one. Use different colored papers, it has to be thick enough to stay stiff and not curl or fold. Cut the paper into large squares. Write the alphabet A to Z and the numbers 0 to 9 on separate square pieces. Make sure they are big and easily seen on both sides of the card with a thick marker pen.
Create a sensory board for your baby A sensory board is the most effective way to support your child’s sensory experiences and gives you many opportunities to teach. It is a fun way to explore a range of textures and sensations and to stimulate a child’s sense of sight, sound, smell and touch. Sensory boards encourage natural curiosity and investigative skills and help children to develop their fine motor skills as they coordinate their movements to feel the different materials. Babies and toddlers develop preferences as to which textures they like and dislike. A sensory board can also help children learn new words too as you support them to describe the different things they are feeling.
Turn into a super sorter By teaching your child to sort small plastic balls by their colour, you are essentially making her learn to concentrate, improve dexterity, and ensure fine motor development. Sorting also helps your child learn to work with a tweezer when she is ready for it. But to be able to use a tweezer, your child has to master using tongs first. Tongs also help your child to develop the pincer grip which involves using her thumb and index finger together to grab things. The pincer grip is a must-have skill as it is needed to hold and write with a pencil.
Stringing the alphabet in a sequence Parents celebrate their child’s mastery of the ABCs as an important milestone on the road to reading and writing. But, there’s much more to learning the alphabet than rendering it in a cute way. Learning the alphabet is a rite of passage in a child’s literacy journey. This is why being consistent in your messaging about letters, how they sound and opportunities for repetition, and the right sequencing of the alphabet is important. Needless to say, letter by letter your child will get there.
Hanging the laundry out to dry This imaginative wash line play is so simple to put together, yet so effective for a child to pretend. Remember, children often learn by watching, and imitating others perform an action while absorbing these experiences by engaging in pretend play. Manipulating and pinching the pegs are great for strengthening finger muscles and working on those fine motor skills and also improve eye and hand coordination by holding the clothes at the same time as watching what they are doing with the pegs.
Digging for spaghetti worms Through this play activity, you will combine fine motor skills with exploration. Find a large, shallow tray, cooked spaghetti, a plastic container, tongs and slightly moist earth. This activity combines sensory play, discovery and fine motor skills for a rich learning experience. Small tongs feature ergonomic depressions to guide the correct grip and will help develop fine motor control and build pencil holding skills and help in developing handwriting skills.
Conclusion My Gym has perfected the art of developing activities to improve fine motor skills and has specially designed programs that will lay a firm foundation for personal, academic and future growth by involving your child in age-appropriate structured and unstructured physical activities and developing thinking and problem-solving skills.
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