What are fine motor skills? It is essentially the coordination of small muscles in movement with the eyes, together with the synchronisation of the hands and fingers. This is an important skill for your child to practice and pick up as he grows into toddlerhood. Improvement of his fine motor skills will help him build his confidence to interact with the objects around him, as well as learning to become independent and thus being about to take care of himself and others around him.
Here are a few fun and easy activities to help your child build up his fine motor skills:
- Scooping and pouring small objects:
Prepare a few small containers or cups with small objects like rice. Pass to your child a spoon and guide him to transfer the small objects from one container to another with the spoon.
You can adjust the difficulty with the size of the objects, containers and also the spoons. - Organising with containers:
With the COVID situation, a lot of us are opting for takeaways instead. Put together a few of these takeaway containers of varies sizes and shapes, open them and mix it up. Put this in front of your child and guide him to cover them all of them back. Open and cover back multiple times for your child to practice this very simple but practical task. - Folding clothes:
To encourage your child from building good habits, start young and involve him in the clothes folding process. Start off with simple ones like shorts and guide him the steps of folding them into the right positions. Socks are also easy to start, simply pile together a few pairs of socks, guide him to sort of the correct ones and then stuff them together. - Playing Play-dough:
Start off with a few simple shapes like circle, triangle and square. The process of needing to pull out the right quantity, squeezing and rolling them into the correct shapes will help him train his fine motor skills.
There are many more fun and slightly more advance activities which we’ll share more in the next posts!