Fine motor skills help children develop the independence to perform everyday tasks confidently and accurately. Weak fine motor skills can impact a child’s ability to write legibly and complete self-care tasks such as getting dressed and cleaning their teeth.
This article explains how to observe and support your child’s fine motor skill movements. We suggest some easy activities for fine motor skills that you can include in your daily routine and through play.
What are fine motor skills?
Fine motor skills involve using the smaller muscles in our hands, fingers, thumbs, and wrists to complete precise movements. We use fine motor skills to manipulate smaller objects with our hands by grasping, holding, turning, rotating, pinching, and squeezing.
Gross motor skills refer to the movements controlled by the bigger muscle groups in our arms, legs, and torso. Gross motor skill movements include crawling, walking, jumping, running, and throwing. Well-developed gross motor skills are the foundation on which we build our fine motor skills.
Why is fine motor skill development important?
Fine motor skills are essential for children to complete everyday tasks such as getting dressed, using utensils, brushing teeth, and packing a bag. If you have a school-aged child, here are ten tasks that require fine motor skill movements in the classroom:
- Handwriting
- Scissor use
- Sharpening pencils
- Removing caps from glue sticks
- Turning pages in a book
- Tying shoelaces
- Opening lunchboxes
- Typing on a computer keyboard
- Manipulating counters in hands-on maths activities
- Managing zips on school bags and jumpers
 And that’s just one part of your child’s day!
What are the benefits of developing fine motor skills?
As you can see from the list above, fine motor skills are essential for your child to independently complete a range of activities. Let’s look at five more benefits of fine motor skills.
Build confidence:
As your child improves their fine motor skills, they increase their ability to participate in and complete activities more independently. The world opens to them, and they experience learning activities and social interactions with newfound confidence. They create goals, take on challenges, and feel empowered.
Improve hand-eye coordination:
Hand-eye coordination is a perceptual motor skill – a combined effort between your sense of sight and fine motor skills. Hand-eye coordination plays a vital role in your child’s play (building a tower of blocks), sporting activities (catching a ball), reading (tracking words across the page), and handwriting (staying on the line). Â
Explore their creative side:
With well-developed fine motor skills, your child can enjoy creative activities such as weaving, threading, painting, and collage.
Improved speech and language:
Fine motor skills are linked to speech and language through small facial, lips, and tongue muscles. If your child can communicate successfully, they will be readily understood, which leads to confidence and a stronger sense of self-worth.
Boost brain power:
The mid-line of your body is an imaginary line down the centre that divides your body into left and right. When your child reaches across their body with their hands, arms, or legs, they cross the mid-line. Children do this when they engage their fine motor skills to get dressed, tie shoelaces and write on lined paper. Crossing the mid-line helps improve hand-eye coordination, visual tracking (for reading and writing), and self-care capabilities. Difficulty crossing the mid-line can lead to social and academic struggles. If you notice your child isn’t crossing their mid-line easily, we recommend you consult an Occupational Therapist.
How to improve fine motor skills
You can help your child improve their fine motor skills through everyday activities. Everything you need is already within your home. It’s as easy as tipping out the Lego, mixing some playdough, or cooking up a storm in the kitchen!
Activities at home that support fine motor skill development through play include:
- Colouring, tracing, drawing, and writing
- Building with Duplo, Lego, or blocks
- Dressing toy dolls
- Beading and threading with pasta shells, beads, or paper straws (cut into smaller pieces)
- Playing board games like Operation and Connect-Four
- Puzzles
- Playdough
- Baking – mixing, rolling, shaping, and then eating with your hands, of course!
These activities engage your child’s fine motor skills through play and allow you to observe their capabilities so that you can support their development in a non-confrontational way.
Fine motor skills for babies
Our children are born ready to learn. Around three months, babies will attempt to grasp a rattle or toy. At six months, they will use their fingers in a raking motion and draw small objects towards them. This presents a choking hazard, so stay alert to small things lying around.
Activities to practice fine motor skills for babies include:
- Set up a play gym so that your baby can lie on their back and reach for the objects dangling from the bar
- Play with stacking cups
- Allow your baby to hold and play with kitchen tools, such as wooden spoons, measuring cups, pots, and pans.
Suitable fine motor skills toys for babies include rattles, sensory balls, and soft stacking blocks.    Â
Fine motor activities for toddlers
Toddlers love to explore and discover! Our intriguing exploratory bags are easy to take with you for on-the-go fine motor skills practice in the pram, car, café, or waiting room.Â
Toddlers also love to ‘help’ around the home. Tasks such as pegging washing on a clothesline, mixing ingredients for baking and watering plants with a trigger hose, or a spray bottle for delicate herbs, help to develop fine motor skills.
Fine motor activities for teens
Overuse of technology, such as gaming devices and mobile phones, can weaken the small muscles required for fine motor control. If you want to know how to improve fine motor skills in teens, check out this list of ten age-appropriate activities that will have your unsuspecting teen developing skills in more ways than one.
- Baking
- Hanging out the washing
- Origami and paper crafts
- Painting and colouring
- Learning to play a musical instrument
- Puzzles, board games, and card games (bring on family game night!)
- ‘Tinkering’ – service their bike or create and maintain a herb or veggie garden.  Â
- Hobbies such as woodwork, sewing, knitting, and model making
- Practising ball skills such as throwing, catching, and shooting some hoops
- Helping out with home repairs and maintenance using tools such as hammers and screwdrivers
Fine motor skill toys
At Special Needs Resources, we stock a wide range of fine motor skills toys, including:
- Musical instruments for babies and toddlers
- Fidget toys for tweens
- Stress balls for teens, and
- Art and craft resources for all ages
Special Needs Resources is dedicated to helping people of all ages reach their potential. Don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team today if you have questions about the right products to support your child’s fine motor skills movements.