Jumping and running, writing and drawing! These are all skills that just seem to pop up in our children overnight. But, did you know that our little ones practice these skills long before we see them emerge? Gross motor and fine motor development in the preschool years are essential building blocks to all kinds of other activities.
If you’ve been following my homeschool preschool series, you know that we recently touched on gross motor development and I gave you some great ideas for helping your little one build those large muscle groups. Let’s take a look at fine motor development this time around!
The development of fine motor skills includes things like writing, coloring, eating with silverware, cutting (yes, even when they hide in the bathroom to cut their own hair!), picking up things with your finger and thumb, etc.
Exercises
- Stickers. Your little student can either put stickers down on a piece of paper in a random fashion or you can print off a page of several large circles or squares and have her fill up only the inside of the shape with stickers.
- Playdough. Have him roll little balls of dough between the pads of his fingers. Roll snakes on the table. Shape and mold other little figures.
- Ripping paper. Use any paper that you have available – newspaper works very well. Show your child how to rip long strips on paper from the newspaper. They can go on to create things from the paper, crumple it up – I’m sure their imaginations will take over!
- Cutting activities. There are so many free printable cutting worksheets on the web, you could spend hours sifting through them all. Some have cutting lines the child needs to follow, some are shapes and all kinds of other fin activities. Print off a couple for him to complete.
- Dot to dot activities. Same with dot to dots – the activities are so wonderful for building those finite hands muscles and there are so many to be found online.
- Lacing and sewing. Stringing beads and macaroni on a long piece of yarn or lacing up homemade lace cards.
- Crumbling paper. Have her try to crumble up a whole piece of newspaper with only one hand.
- Finger painting. Such a fun activity with such a great exercise!
- Spray bottle. Get the inexpensive spray bottles from the health and beauty section at the drug store or WalMart. Fill them with water and spray the sidewalk. Fill it with colored water and spray the snow. Have them spray shaving cream down the drain of the sink.
- Tweezers. Using tweezers, you can have them pick up cotton balls, chocolate chips, large multi-faceted beads and lots of other small items.
So many of these ideas are just fun things that preschoolers love to do anyway! Why not just set them down beside you while you teach your other homeschoolers and let them play with these activities, knowing that you are also building fine motor skills!
