Art of Developing Fine Motor Skills in Toddlers!

Kids are like new buds and flowers! Always ready to bloom with such a natural essence…

One of the most important aspects of toddler development lies in encouraging good motor skills amongst the preschoolers. Cheering toddlers to learn fine motor skills will help them enjoy greater independence. The fine motor skills help the children to do small but equally vital things like opening doors, brushing teeth, zipping the zippers and washing hands, to name a few.  It is not just doing something for with hands but also adding the required strength to do these things and then move ahead to learn the gross motor skills that involve the advance things like having breakfast and climbing stairs.

Developmental Importance of Fine Motor Skills

Allowing your kids to learn fine motor skills is one of the basic lessons of parenting. When these skills are clubbed with the boosting up hand-eye coordination, the motor skills helps in opening up the gateway to learning and exploring incredible stuff with creative expression.

Some research studies show the fact that emphasis is given completely over the intellectual activities – memorization of numbers and letters for example, which is far less beneficial at this juncture rather than the pursuits that encourage the fine motor capabilities along with the hand-eye coordination. All these skills rather than reciting or counting the alphabets are seen laying the tangible foundation for the educational learning in the coming years for the preschool kids.  For learning to read and write, the kids should have coordinated and strong efforts to keep the pencil straight in hand for a longer duration and then participate in the other activities.

Mastering the Art of Developing the Fine Motor Skills

When it comes to learning fine motor skills, there are many ways to hone these skills. You can try the following tips for your toddler development, for developing the fine motor skills –

• Playing with the dough

Playing with dough or clay can be the simplest ways of gaining fine motor skills. There are play doughs available in the market for different age groups. This helps your toddler to try making little things using fingers and little hands, allowing them to reach to the different level of activities.

• Try Basters

With the help of squeezing activity, your toddler will allow the finger muscles to stress against the palm. Using basters can help the preschoolers to carry out the squeezing activity efficiently. Thus, allowing the muscles in the hand and palm to get to work.

• Try Pipettes and Eye Droppers

As the toddler moves ahead to become a preschooler, we see the transition of becoming stronger and more developed. A majority can start by using the eye droppers or pipettes using watercolors or even water. A lot many concentrations are required while you use these tools and this is usually a calming activity for the busy kids.

• Using Tongs and Tweezers

By using the tongs and tweezers you toddler will add strength to the fingers and hands. They are simpler to start with as the toddlers quite enjoy the squeeze and open activity using tongs. Once the toddlers gain strength with these activities, you may introduce tweezers to your kids.

• Threading beads

By threading the beads with the help of lacing cards, your toddler will gain some strength that acts as a good source of fine motor development. Start with large size stringing beads and then stop to the cut straws and finally switch to the pony beads.

• Giving Direction to your Toddler

Small children like to fill their toy bag with their toys just to spill over and inside it. Though this activity may sound very mundane, this clubs the muscle movements, cognitive reasoning, and focus. The other ways to do so is to boost up the grip and allow adding the finger strength with the help of squeezing the wet sponge or by simply looking for the toys, which are buried inside the sand.

• Loading thing

Your toddler requires a decent amount of wrist and hand stability to place the blocks with the control. The large wooden ones are simple for the toddlers to maneuver. Once she is seen getting the hangover it, you are supposed to switch the same to the small size building materials but at the same time hold it over the interlocking bricks till the baby becomes two years old.

• Try Pincer Grasp

For your preschool kids, you need to encourage Pincer Grasp, which can be done by allowing your kids to start picking up small size items including Cheerios with the help of forefinger and thumb along with baby wipe container along with the scarves.

Encouraging Creativity…

One of the vital tasks of parenting is to promote creativity. A majority of the small children can easily showcase their creativity with the help of using crayons. Especially after your child has completed his 15 months and by the time they reach 2 years, they start scribbling the same wax colorful crayons. You can give them big size crayons along with a couple of large size pieces of chalks and the finger paints for allowing expressing themselves on the paper. In fact, there are various ways in which creativity can be encouraged among preschool kids and toddlers.

Parenting may be a daunting experience especially when we talk about toddlers and small children. However, at the same time, it is quite a playful journey as well. All this depends upon the way the parents deal with the small kids…

Let your kids bloom in the garden of learning!