Play Activities for Fine Motor Development

Play Activities to Foster Fine Motor Development

Fine motor abilities involve the use of small muscles i.e. the muscles of fingers, wrist, and hand. Fine motor coordination is essential to task like writing, tying shoelaces, turning doorknobs, using scissors. Eye-hand coordination is also essential to complete such task.

Art Activities

You can use crayons, pencils or brush for drawing, painting and printing objects that are theme based. You can also make artwork using clay, paper tearing, paper crumpling, play doh, paper cutting, and paper pasting and such kind of artwork to enhance finer motor development in a preschool child. Paper crumpling is one of the best activity to enhance fine motor skills. You will need crepe paper. Ask the children to tear a piece of crepe paper and crumple it into small balls. Crumpling involves a great movement of fingers and it requires consistency. You can create a different template based on any theme. Let us take an example of Christmas. You can create a template of Santa Claus on a paper and ask the children to crumple the paper and paste it on the template.

Construction Activities

Kids love to experiment. Often you will find them running around the house gathering all the objects they can access, pile them up on top of the other, make some structure and they break it down. And even after breaking it down, they try to build it again using their own imagination and creativity. Construction activities are popular during early childhood years.  It involves a lot of imagination which further develops the cognitive skills of the child as well. To foster fine motor development, you can provide children with different varieties of materials. It could be anything like blocks made of plastic, empty matchboxes, soap and toothpaste cartons that are usually unused in the house.

Click this link for Warm Up Activities in the Classroom.

String or Thread Activities

You can take them for a walk and ask them to collect some leaves of random size or maybe similar in size. You can then provide a jute rope or paper string.  Now punch holes in the leaves and give them back to the child. Ask the child to make necklaces by stringing the leaves.
Leaves can be replaced with beads. But ensure that they are not too tiny in size. You can also give colorful card papers precut in a heart shape or any shape. Punch a hole. You can then ask the children to make beautiful paper necklaces by stringing it together with the help of satin ribbon. Once they are done making this artwork, they can wear it around their neck.

Playing with Sand

Kids love to play with sand. If you have sand play areas built in or outside your playgroup, take your children over there. Dig a pit in the sand. Ask the children to create beach house, hill, and castle out of the sand. Let the kids use their own imagination and play with sand. You can tie apron to ensure that the children’s clothes do not get dirty.

Pebbles, leaves, and Seed

Mix some pebbles, seed, and marbles in a container. Ask the children to separate them into different piles. This will help the children to classify. You can also draw some shapes on a page and can ask the children to paste the leaves and seed to make a collage. Besides pebble, marbles can also be used for identification of shapes. Take a sandbox, trace different shapes and ask the children to place the pebbles on the outline and repeat the name of the shape. When doing so, the eye-hand coordination will improve and develop the concept of shapes.

Most of the activities mentioned above can be organized indoor. It doesn’t require much movement and space. By planning such activities on regular basis, you can foster fine motor development in each child.

If you like my blog, don't forget to share, like and comment. 
If you have any questions, type in the below comment box. 
I would love to hear from you.