Fine motor skills: Why should I promote them in my child?
Fine motor skills are all small, filigree movement skills, such as writing, closing buttons or mouth movements when speaking. Learn in our article how important fine motor skills are for child development and how you can promote fine motor skills through exercises or games.
Fine motor skills: What is it?
Fine motor skills, an area ofmotor skills, refers to all movement skills that a person can learn with his fingers, toes and face. These are very precise, small movements in which force dosing plays a major role. Skills include:
- Paint
- To write
- Tie Loop
- Button shirt
- Braiding hair
- Cut
- Piano
- Grimace
- Control of speech muscles
After a child acquires gross motor skills in baby and toddler age, which are the basis for the development of fine motor skills, the finemotormovement sequences become more and more interesting with increasing age. A child wants to dress alone or eat with cutlery like the adults. For this, it has to train its fine motor skills.
Why is fine motor skills so important?
Fine motor skills are important for the child’s development, because at the latest when it comes to school, fine motor activities are required of him. If it has insufficiently trained fine motor skills, problems with learning to write and draw are very likely. But well-developed fine motor skills are also important in other areas, for example when learning to speak, dressing independently or facial expressions and gestures.
Age-appropriate development is of great importance because your child’s level of development also affects other areas of development. A child who is not developed in terms of fine motor skills according to his age can only follow with difficulty in class, because he learns to write much slower and more laboriously than his peers. This can cause emotional problems, while children with normally developed fine motor skills have a much more positive self-image.
Promote fine motor skills with games
To support your child’s fine motor development, you can make sure that your child gets enough space and opportunity to move. Let your child try things out in peace and explore objects and perceive them with all their senses. With these play ideas you can playfully promote the fine motor skills of your child.
- Egg run: An egg is balanced on a spoon, either alone over different obstacles or in several. This allows eye-hand coordination to be trained in a playful way. Those who are afraid of the mess of broken eggs on the floor can also use rubber or hard-boiled eggs.
- Knead: To train the finger muscles and the mobility of the fingers, putty is very suitable. From this, colorful figures can be formed. But also the kneading of dough or mud trains the fine motor skills of your child.
- Blow cotton balls or peanut: On the table, an obstacle course is set up from dishes and a cotton ball or peanut is blown to the other side of the table using a drinking straw and without using your hands.
- Threading and crafting beads: Handling scissors and glue and putting on pearls are not only fun, but also promote fine motor skills.
- Painting with your toes: Not only painting with your hands is good for the development of fine motor skills, but also painting with your toes. This trains the mobility of the feet and the muscles in the toes.
- Building blocks: The classics in each playroom also promote eye-hand coordination and force dosage. Who builds the tallest tower?
You can find even more beautiful motor skills toys for children in our article “Build, seesaw, swing: Motor skills toys for children”.