Ways To Help Improve Fine Motor Skills In Toddlers

Hi Friends!

Today I’m chatting all about fine motor skills and sharing a few fun activities you can do with your kiddos to help build hand strength up!

What Are Fine Motor Skills And Why Are They So Important?

According to Wikipedia, fine motor skill is the coordination of small muscles, in movements—usually involving the synchronisation of hands and fingers—with the eyes. The complex levels of manual dexterity that humans exhibit can be attributed to and demonstrated in tasks controlled by the nervous system. For autistic children motor issues can start as early as infancy and in Isaiah’s case this has been a presistant trend. He’s had a host of gross motor delays and now that he’s three we are now running into fine motor setbacks that he needs to master to reach the next set of goals he has in place. To help, I have set up a few activities over the last few weeks that can help strengthen fine motor skills and I wanted to share them with you if youre looking to help your child gain strength in this area of development. Developing fine motor skills is so important for kiddos to be able to do things like hand write, button a shirt, use a keyboard to type and even cutting with scissors in the future. It‘s very important!

Here are a few activities that are low prep and easy to do on a weekend or if you have a few hours to play with your child that can start building fine motor skills!

Floating Letters: Fill a plastic bin with water and drop in alphabet letters. I recommend plastic letters or the munchkin floating bath letters for this activity. Using a spoon your child can scoop the letters out of the bin one by one. This is so fun and helpful for fine motor skills as well as hand eye coordination.

PlayDoh Play With Tools: Play Doh can build your child‘s hand muscles and they have no clue how much they are working when they are having so much fun playing! Introduce tools like cutters and rollers to help them use their hands more and be creative!

Playing With Pop Up Toys: Pop up toys like this one have different knobs and buttons that challenge little ones to use their hand strength to see a fun surprise!

Stacking Blocks: Stacking up blocks takes some serious skills! Introducing new building materials can motivate your child to use their hands. My boys like mega bloks but building tools like sticker bricks and magna tiles can be helpful as well in building fine motor skills.

Pasting Paper: This activity is so easy with just giving your child some cut up paper and glue and having them paste away! Seems really easy but it takes so much for them to pick up tiny paper pieces and glue them to each other.

Puzzles: Puzzles are awesome for manipulating two objects and fitting them together- definitely the ultimate hand workout!

Sensory Bins: Look and find sensory bins are something Occupational Therapists use to help with developing fine motor skills and so fun for little ones! Use water beads, beans or even oatmeal to hide toys and objects for kiddos to find. They use their hands to search and are usually so motivated to scoop, dig and play with different textures.