Today’s post is from a guest writer. Her name is Angela Ellington and she is the Creative Director of The Truthful Tutor. Angela Ellington is a tutor located in Los Angeles, California. She has been a tutor for the last six years and has had hundreds of clients over that time. She has learned that one of the most important things for success is beginning early. She has a website where she offers tips, tricks, and resources to other educators and parents. She also creates worksheets for educators and parents. She hopes that she will be able to help people get the resources they need to make sure all students are successful. To read more about her, visit https://www.thetruthfultutor.com.
Being able to hold a pencil, color, write letters, even picking up little things is all thanks to fine motor skills. However, for little ones the strength in their little finger muscles may not be built up for these tasks. However, they need to develop these skills before they get to kindergarten and are expected to write, draw, or color within the lines. If they have not practiced fine motor skills, it will be harder for them in school. So, below are five fun activities that can be done with your kids to help them develop these skills.
- Q-tip Painting
The first fun activity for building fine motor skills is Q tip painting. Please note that this actually takes some fine motor skills to begin with. This is a great exercise for improving existing fine motor skills
You can also use this activity to practice different words with your child. You can print out pages of sight words, and then they have to take a q-tip and paint little dots along the word. You can also do this with different lines or zig zags. For sight word worksheets, click here. For trace the line worksheets, click here
This activity overall is a little more fun than just tracing. I would suggest having multiple colors of paint so that your children can choose or use different colors throughout the word. This allows them to be a little more creative with it, and it will keep their interest longer.
- Slime Spelling
Slime is all the craze right now. It is being used in science projects, and craft stores seem to have dedicated sections now for the making of slime. Did you know that slime can actually help with fine motor skills?
Introducing Slime Spelling: In this activity, your kids will form letters with slime. They will have to roll it out and try to form it together. Then, they can watch as it loses its form. Let me tell you, they will definitely be laughing over that.
To makes slime follow one of these recipes from Little Bins for Little Hands. If you don’t have slime, don’t want to make it, or want a more solid option, work with Playdoh instead.
- Pipe Cleaner Weaving
This will probably be the activity that looks the strangest, but believe me your kids will have hours and hours of fun with it. There are two main things that you need for this activity: pipe cleaners and a colander (note if you don’t have a colander or would rather not use one a box with holes punched in it will work also).
Your kids will practice putting the pipe cleaners into the holes. Extra points if they can flip it over and weave them through again. This overall helps them with the skills of putting something small into another small thing, which builds up those fine muscles that they need. Once they get the hang of it, it may even be one of their favorite games.
- Pom Pom Sorting
Pom Poms in general are a great way to work on fine motor skills. Likewise, sorting activities are amazing for so many reasons, so why not put these things together.
There are also so many different ways that you can do this sorting activity. You can ask your child to sort the pom poms by color, by size, You can even put other items in the bin, and they have to separate the pom poms from the other things.
The easiest way to have kids sort them by color is to have colored cups, and they will put the pom poms in the cup of the same color. This is also helping them with color recognition. For sorting by size you may even have them put them in a line from smallest to the biggest. Really, the possibilities are endless.
- Scissor Skills
Another reason to have fine motor skills is to be able to cut out pictures effectively and to cut straight lines. Printing out cut and paste for children to complete is helpful for building fine motor skills.
There are other worksheets that just practice cutting straight or curved lines. These are just as helpful for working on fine motor skills even if they are not as fun. There are many great worksheets and scissor skill projects out there, but some of my favorites are found here.
What Activities Do You Do?
There are so many great fine motor activities out there, and I couldn’t fit them all into this one short article, but maybe we can add more in the comments. Please comment below with your favorite fine motor skills activities.
