From bilateral hand coordination to precision grips, uncover a range of activities to strengthen fine motor skills in preschoolers.
In this blog post, I want to discuss fine motor skills for preschool-aged children and explain how we teach them in the free homeschool preschool curriculum: Ready for Kindergarten and Beyond homeschool.
Fine motor skills are important for children to learn before they start kindergarten. They are needed to open and close lunchboxes, put papers into a folder, write, color, and draw. Writing, coloring, and drawing require a tripod grasp of a writing tool. It can be difficult for undeveloped hands to manage this advanced grasp.
There are many skills involved in holding a pencil or crayon and writing with ease and skill for an extended period of time.
But don’t worry, we’re here to help.
We approach fine motor skills by breaking down the different muscle groups and the different activities that have to be coordinated together for a child to be able to write. Then we break those down into categories of exercises. Then, at the bottom of this article, you’ll find a detailed list of fine motor skills activities for 3-5-year-olds that work on each of these individual areas:
All of these things work together to give your child the skills that they need to be able to write.
What we do is weave them into the curriculum, where every week, your child practices activities in at least four of these different areas. Then, gradually, towards the end, after your child has had a chance to build muscle strength, coordination, hand-eye coordination, and bilateral hand coordination for several weeks, we begin to work in those more advanced grips, like the tripod grasp, that they will need to hold a pencil.
Core strength is quite important for fine motor skills, and we don't usually think about them going together, but they do. Sitting in a chair at a desk or a table for any length of time while writing does require tremendous core, and shoulder strength. This is why we often see children complain about these activities.
They may not realize why they don't want to do this or why it's uncomfortable, but it often has to do with the fact that they just haven't developed the muscles and the strength that they need in order to be able to do it comfortably.
You can help them with that by giving them the opportunity to engage in a wide variety of exercises that will help build that strength and make it more comfortable for them to do that.
A big part of developing core strength in preschoolers is outdoor play activities like playing on the playgrounds, riding their bikes, running around, playing baseball, kicking a ball, and throwing a ball.
All of these things factor into your child's development of the fine motor skills needed to write, so make sure that they get plenty of that outdoor playtime.
In outdoor playtime, they also get a lot of fine motor exercises. They pick up tiny pebbles on the ground and play in the sand or dirt with their hands. All of that lends itself to them exercising their core muscles and hand muscles to be ready to write when it's time to do that.
Unstructured play is another fantastic way to develop these skills. As they build with blocks and Legos or help you stir cookie dough in the kitchen, all of these more unstructured activities are also fantastic practice for building these muscles.
This is very interesting. If you look at an X-ray of a preschool child's hand next to a 6-year-old's, you'll see that they look very different.
Image source: When Should Children be able to Write? - Gavin McCormack
Little children's hands are not developed enough. They lack muscle and bone structure. You'll see how different the bones are in the hands of a child who's just a few years older. So, the little children don't have the physical hand structure necessary to write comfortably for extended amounts of time.
And this is often why you see young children who have very little writing stamina. I want you to know that that is completely normal. You often hear young children, when they're asked to do a worksheet or color a coloring page, say that they're tired, that they want to stop before they finish, that their hand hurts. And a lot of times, I think parents think that this is an excuse, “They don't want to do the activity”, but I would encourage you to believe them, and usually, when they say their hand hurts, it actually does.
The way to approach this is with incremental, small amounts of practice frequently, and that's why we offer you these activities below. So first of all, you have a choice of activities to practice different things. Your child may enjoy one more than another. That way, you can zero in on those activities that they really engage with and want to have some sustained practice with to help build those muscles.
That always helps when they enjoy the activity.
And then you've got to make sure that you're selecting activities from those wide ranges of skills so that they're not practicing just one muscle group, but they're practicing a variety of muscle groups. And that's how we've incorporated it into the Ready for Kindergarten and Beyond curriculum so that each week you are selecting from a range of activities to exercise a range of muscles and build that stamina that's necessary for writing.
All of this practice goes a long way to getting your child ready to go to kindergarten and ready to complete those worksheets and those coloring pages with comfort, and where it doesn't bother them to sit at a table or sit at a desk for a certain amount of time. They will be able to hold a pencil correctly and complete whatever the assigned task is without running into those problems.
So now that you understand a little bit more about how we approach fine motor skills, you'll be better prepared to select the activities that work best for your child and your schedule.
The ability to use both hands together, or use one hand as a stabilizer and the other as a manipulator.
Activities:
The ability to manipulate objects within the hand. Includes mobility, shift, and rotation activities.
Activities:
The ability to coordinate what your hands are doing with what your eyes see to achieve the desired result.
Activities:
The ability to make fine movements in a controlled manner.
Activities:
The ability to willfully move each finger independently of the others.
Activities:
The ability to hold your wrist in a functional position while working and stabilize your wrist while manipulating objects with your fingers.
Activities:
The ability to rotate the thumb to the necessary position for the tip of the thumb and index fingertip to touch in opposition (ie. Make the “OK” sign).
Activities:
Squeezing the entire hand shut around an object.
Activities:
Where the hand curves to hold a round or spherical object.
Activities:
Pad-to-pad grip of the thumb and index finger.
Activities:
Gripping using the pads of the index and middle finger, along with the thumb.
Activities:
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