As a parent, a whole lot of responsibility falls on your shoulders. From helping your child take their first steps to helping them learn how to do day-to-day activities like tying their shoelaces or buttoning up their shirt, you've got to teach them everything. All of these activities use small muscles of your fingers, hands, wrists, toes, and feet. And how well these muscles coordinate and work depends on how strong your fine motor skills are.
The stronger the fine motor skills are, the better the coordination between the brain and the muscles, and the better will you be able to perform basic routine activities. However, when a child is young, their fine motor skills aren't very well developed which is why they can't seem to be able to do even the simplest of the task themselves.
Numerous activities can improve your child's fine motor skills. If you want to start working on strengthening your child's fine motor skills, you should start when they're young. Let's have a look at some of the most effective ways of improving a child's fine motor skills.
1. Drawing and Painting
Drawing and painting are excellent ways of building and improving fine motor skills in children. Not only do drawing and colouring help with fine motor skills, but they boost a child's creativity as well. Using different mediums for drawing, colouring, and painting strengthens hand-eye coordination. When a child holds a paintbrush, they learn to control their hand grip over things better. A newer painting technique, paint-by-numbers, is an excellent form of artwork that offers all of the aforementioned benefits and more!
2. Using Child Scissors for Cutting
Cutting with scissors is another activity that can improve children's hand-eye coordination and concentration span. When a child is cutting a pre-drawn picture or shape, they're fully focused on cutting by the outline, which is exactly how this activity works to improve a child's fine motor skills.
3. Using Kitchen Tools
You may not like your child coming into the kitchen and pulling out the tongs and spatulas from the cabinet while you're working, but did you know learning to hold tongs and picking up objects like uncooked pasta or fruit pieces can actually improve fine motor skills in children? This is because holding and picking things up involves using hand and wrist muscles and focusing, all of which offers a wide range of benefits for children in the long run.
4. Playtime During Bath
Another great way to help improve your child's fine motor skills is to let them have their playtime during their bath. Give them small cups and squeaky toys to play. Filling and pouring cups and squeezing the squeaky toys goes beyond just play. These activities can improve your child's grip and muscle coordination significantly.
There are so many things we stop our children from doing because we stress about the mess we'll have to clean later, but if you knew how the child learns through these activities, you might never stop them again. Everything a child does can be transformed into a learning experience with just a few modifications and tweaking. Play-n-learn is the most effective way to teach a kid basic concepts, and that's exactly what you should be doing!