Motor Activities for Your Child

Sep 1st, 2021

Motor skills are used everyday throughout our lives. They help us move and do everything from lifting heavy items to typing on a keyboard. Motor skills and motor control begin developing after birth, and will progress as children grow.

Having good motor control also helps children explore the world around them, which can help with many other areas of development.

Motor skills are broken up into two categories: gross motor skills and fine motor skills. Mastering both are important for children’s growth and independence.

Gross motor skills are movements related to large muscles such as legs, arms, and trunk.

Children can develop their gross motor skills through a variety of fun activities. Active play that uses the large muscles in their legs, arms, and trunk is important for your preschooler's health and physical development. Learning to harness the power of their muscles to run, jump, throw, catch, and kick is vital to the growth of their bodies and brains. Plus, it's a lot of fun.

Building and navigating. Creating obstacle courses with furniture, pillows, boxes, and blankets will develop large motor skills.
Dancing. They can go freestyle or follow songs with movements, such as "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes," "I'm a Little Teapot," "The Wheels on the Bus," or "Popcorn".
Hopping. Just jumping from place to place on the floor. Setting targets with masking tape or cardboard can be a fun activity.
Large-scale arts and crafts activities. These stimulate both large motor skills and creativity.
Playing pretend. Children boost motor skills when they use their bodies to become waddling ducks, stiff-legged robots, galloping horses, soaring planes, or whatever they can imagine.
Pulling and pushing. Wagons, large trucks, doll strollers, or shopping carts, can be a motor-developing part of a child's play.

Fine motor skills are movements involving smaller muscle groups such as those in the hand and wrist.

Children develop motor skills at different rates. When young children struggle with fine motor skills, they can have trouble with key tasks like grasping utensils (like pencils), moving objects with their fingertips, and using tools like scissors. They may also have difficulty learning to tie shoes . If your child’s fine motor skills need a little extra help, you might want to try these activities.

Play-dough and Putty. Play-dough and putty are often used as part of the heavy work component of a sensory diet. They can also help improve a child’s fine motor skills. Encourage your child to squeeze, stretch, pinch and roll “snakes” or “worms” with the play clay. You can even have your child try to cut the play-dough with scissors. (Learn how to make three types of sensory-friendly slime , including putty slime.)
Painting. Different types of painting can help strengthen your child’s hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity. Finger painting gives children an opportunity to use their hands — and to get messy. Painting with a brush helps children learn to hold a brush and gain greater control using it as a tool. (Paint-by-number kits are great for brush painting.) To add a little sensory play to the mix, you can even try scratch-and-sniff painting .
Playing with Sponges. A new, clean sponge, some water and two bowls are all you need for another activity to build fine motor skills. Fill a bowl with water and leave the other empty. Your child can soak the sponge in the water and then squeeze out the sponge into the other bowl. It’s a simple game that can strengthen hands and forearms. If you cut off a cube of the sponge and have a small chalkboard and some chalk, you can also do a “Wet-Dry-Try” multisensory handwriting activity .
Rice Races. Divide a handful of uncooked rice into two plastic bowls and have an empty bowl handy. Give your child small plastic tweezers and grab a pair for yourself. Then, have a race to see who can be the first to transfer their rice into the empty bowl using the tweezers. If your child is struggling because the grains of rice are too small, you may want to begin with O-shaped cereal or pony beads.
Water play. Fill a cup about a quarter full of water. Give your child an empty cup and an eyedropper or a clean medicine syringe. Have your child try to transfer the water from one cup to the other by drawing the water into the dropper or syringe and then dropping or squirting it into the empty cup. You could also give your child more cups, add food coloring to the water, and make this a color-mixing experiment.
Gardening and Planting. Digging and gardening may seem like activities more suited to building gross motor skills , but there are parts of it that require smaller muscle control, too. For instance, transferring seedlings into a garden requires hand-eye coordination skills to safely carry the smaller plant to the new hole. Your child will also need to be able to grasp a trowel to dig and to use a pincer grasp when picking up seeds to plant.

From: Various Resources

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