How to improve my child’s fine motor skills

Fine motor skills are the skills use when we make small movements. These skills generally involve coordination between muscle groups and neurons in the fingers, wrists etc.
Your child's fine motor skill helps him/her to grow more independent, here are some activities which help your child develop fine motor skills.

• Clapping hands

Tiny tots feel great when they clap hands for a little achievement. Clapping helps them in improving the brain and hand coordination. Clapping is an exciting way to learn concepts in math’s like numbers and helps children develop a sense of rhythm, learn besides a flair for music.

• cutting out simple shapes with safety scissors

Let your child cut some stuff like clay dough, straws, strings, cooked noodles with a pair of safety scissors before cutting coarse paper. Cutting shapes out of paper with scissors in a proper way helps them improve their ability to coordinate finger dexterity, hand eye co-ordination.

• Pasting pictures

 Pasting cut out pictures to paper, for example, also develops fun. Take your child’s favorite rhyme and make a storyboard of that particular rhyme. Collect some pictures and assist them to paste these pictures to help them in improving their fine motor skills as well as in recalling rhyme and their plot lines.

• Puzzle arrangement

Tricky puzzles are always challenging and absorb a child’s complete concentration besides putting their thinking skills to test. Take cardboard puzzles and ask the child to arrange the puzzle. This can vastly improve their thinking skills and hand-eye coordination.

• Buttoning and unbuttoning

Little hands are always busy doing some or the other thing and most of all they also love getting ready on their own. Buttoning and unbuttoning of shirts can improve their fine motor skills. First, let them learn how to unbutton as matching buttonholes can be challenging. Demonstrate the process one step after step, encouraging your child to follow suit. Over time, your child will pick up both ability and speed.

• Building blocks tower or stacking

Stacking playing with toys or making a pyramid/tower helps children in developing their fine motor skills and also cognitive development, their ability to identify shapes and colors besides honing hand and eye coordination greatly challenge your child challenge to pick a particular shape or build color pyramid with in a time limit helps in the development of multiple skills. Like time management and self management skills.

• Clothes –line games

Little munchkins always try to learn from you and imitate you. Let them participate in your routine chores at home as this develops bonding. Hanging clothes to dry makes little muscles stronger. Challenge them to hang a single sock of different colors and ask the child to pick the other socks of the same color such activities would encourage the child to learn colors as well as the develop fine motor skills

• Lacing or weaving

Take a cardboard sheet and cut it into a shape of your choice and then punch in holes edges of the shape. Take some lace, add a piece of tape to both edges and teach them how to weave from one hole to another. Lacing activities like this ensure that your child has fun while he or she grows .