Developing Fine Motor Skills with Fun Activities

Easy Fine Motor Skills Activity

Guest post from KidsActivitiesBlog.com

A fine motor skills activity can help young children develop and strengthen their hand, wrist, and finger muscles.  Early learning skills such as writing and dressing oneself are dependent on these muscles.  Kids Activities Blog offers many great ideas for your child to have fun while building those important fine motor skills.

Easy and inexpensive activities for kids do it for me every time. For this activity, all you need are pipe cleaners and beads. I picked up these gorgeous and colorful various sized beads from JoAnn Fabrics months ago for a very reasonable price. The pipe cleaners we had in our supply closet and the small pot I purchased at Ikea for a ridiculously low price.

This activity is appropriate for 2-6 year old children generally, but I will say that our 1.5 year old is the one who noticed and started working on the activity. For him, the younger child, he was drawn to the colors, sure, but really he wanted to manipulate and work on that three finger grip. So, the activity was really focused on fine motor skills development. For my older child, he enjoyed the beading but wanted more from the exercise than the fine motor work. So, we worked on patterns with colors and bead sizes.

I prepared the small pot ahead of time with the beads and the pipe cleaners. Then, I placed it in the fine motor work area of our play/learning space.  I waited for one of my sons to notice the work. Once that happened, I introduced the work to both of them.

Early Learning

Extensions for Younger Children (less than 3 years old)

  • Language such as  “bead”, “pot”, “small” , “medium”, “large” & “long”, “short”, “many, few”
  • Integrate basic color learning and identification
  • Counting and the concepts of “many” and “few”

Extensions for Older Children (3-6 years old)

  • Language/Pre-Math –  “greater than”and “less than”
  •  Integrate color grading – “darkest to light” or color matching with beading two pipe cleaners
  • Pattern work
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