Supporting your child’s fine motor skills through play – from 12 months to four years

Fine motor skills are the small, precise movements we make with our hands, fingers, feet and toes. They involve co-ordinating muscles, joints, and nerves to make the movements necessary to complete a task. For example, doing up buttons, tying shoelaces, using cutlery, and so on.

Developing fine motor skills

The development of fine motor skills for children involves different muscle groups and actions, such as grasping, pinching, squeezing, and manipulating objects with precision.

Hand-eye coordination is an important part your child developing their fine motor skills. Their fine motor skills also need sensory feedback from their eyes, muscles and joints and touch receptors in their skin. This allows them to adjust their movements based on what they see, touch, and hold.

The development of fine motor and hand skills is similar to the construction of a house. The first thing that is laid down is the foundation which then supports all the levels above it.

Fine motor skills (1) (cropped)

Stability	Stability is a combination of strength and balance that allows us keep one part of our body still while another part moves e.g. being able to put on your shoes without falling over.
Bilateral Coordination	Bilateral Coordination is the efficient use of both hands during an activity, and most daily activities require the coordinated use of both hands, one as the ‘doer’ and one as the ‘helper’ e.g. holding a bowl with one hand and stirring with the other, or blowing bubbles and holding the container at the same time. Image source: freepik.com
Sensation	Sensation is knowing where your fingers, hands and arms are and how they are moving without constant conscious attention to them e.g. knowing where to put your hands when catching a ball, and also feeling the difference between a tissue and a coin in your pocket. Image source: freepik.com
Dexterity	Dexterity allows us make small precise accurate movements with our hand without tremendous effort e.g. picking up a raisin, picking up a crayon and positioning it in your hand. Image source: freepik.com
Daily Living Skills	Daily Living Skills are the functional skills children are expected to use to participate in every day, for example, feeding themselves, getting dressed in the morning, participating in school activities, and playing are all daily living skills for children. Images source: freepik.com
Refinement of skills	Refinement of skills takes years to complete, for example, a child may begin to finger feed independently around his/her first birthday, but he/she will not have refined his eating skills e.g. cutting, spreading with a knife until mid to late childhood. The development of hand skills begins in early infancy and continues into adulthood.

Fine motor activities

Below are some ideas you might like to consider when playing with your child from 12 months to four years. These activities will support your child’s fine motor skills. As with all play activities, be led by what your child enjoys and finds most interesting. All children develop differently and at their own pace. The ages given below are guidelines only.

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Images source: freepik.com

From approximately 12 months

At this age, children may start to understand pretend play which replicates routines in their life. Playing with pretend food, for example, can be an interactive, meaningful activity to your infant. You could have a pretend picnic with your child, inviting some of their toys along. You can pack up a bag or basket of toy food and dishes. You can each take turns in preparing the food, serving it and ‘eating’ it.

At eight months, children may begin to use building blocks, and by 18 months they may be able to build a tower of four blocks or more. Blocks also help children to refine their fine motor skills.

Playing with cars and trucks is another way that children work on their fine motor skills. You could play a parking game, where your child is asked to ‘park’ the cars by putting them into the spaces. You can ask your child to park the cars according to size (small or big), colour, or even function (emergency vehicles versus passenger vehicles).

Posting dry spaghetti through a colander is brilliant for toddlers to work on their fine motor and concentration skills. It’s easy to set up, and easy to tidy up too.

You can also use bubble wrap. Use the hand-over-hand technique to support your child to press/push bubbles with their hand or thumb and index finger (pincer grip). The hand-over-hand technique is where the adult places his or her hand on the child’s hand to guide them in completing a task. This activity supports your child’s exposure to textures and sound. It also develops hand strength.

Encourage your child to tear catalogue pages into various shapes and sizes. This activity develops their use of both hands, one hand to hold the paper, and one hand to tear. This develops strength in their hands. It also helps develop hand-eye coordination.

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Images source: Ana Klipper, and Jerry Wang on Unsplash

From approximately 2 years

During this period, children enjoy creating things through arts and crafts activities, such as finger painting or starting to paint with brushes. They will also begin to refine their painting movement, moving from using their whole arm to painting with wrist action instead, which allows them to paint with smaller movements.

Reading books together also encourages fine motor movement, as your child progresses from turning two or three pages at a time to being able to turn one page at a time.

Many toddlers are fascinated by trains. Small train sets support children’s fine motor development. Invite your child to create their own village with a small set of building blocks and a simple train set.

Puzzles are an excellent way of improving toddlers’ fine motor skills. Jigsaw puzzles of up to 12 pieces are suitable for children between the ages of 2 and 3.

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Image sources: freepik.com and Sonya Lynne, Unsplash

From approximately 3 years

For this age group, drawing and painting is important. Children can begin to draw simple shapes, such as circles or lines, with crayons or pencils. This activity encourages creativity while refining their ability to control writing tools.

Playdough is a great play activity – rolling it, making balls or snakes or cookies, or cutting it up with toy plastic knife, all encourages use of their fine motor skills.

Another exercise to consider is getting them to thread large beads onto a shoelace. A variation on this would be using dry pasta (like rigatoni) and colouring them with food dye. You can use a shoelace or some thick chenille pipe cleaners and get your child to make a pasta necklace.

You could also give your child a magazine or catalogue and kids’ scissors and get them to cut out their favourite images and make collages. They can glue those pictures onto a fresh page to make a collage. They will need your help with this.

Images source: Christopher Luther, and Arren Mills, Unsplash

From approximately 4 years

Children at this age will generally have a relatively long attention span and be able to engage in longer periods of play. The examples given for 3-year-olds are applicable here also but can be made more challenging for a slightly older child.

For example, with arts and crafts, your child may be starting to paint and cut with scissors with more precision. You can support this development by adding more items and options to their arts and crafts materials (paints, crayons, markers, pencils), glue, scissors, glitter, stickers, different types and sizes of beads etc.

Giving them chalk to write on the ground outside can be another fun way for your child to work on their fine motor skills.

Getting your child to hang up their artwork then on the wall, using clothes pegs onto string is another quick way to work on their pincer grip, concentration and hand-eye coordination.

Sticker books are another good play activity. Peeling off the stickers and placing them on the page develops their pincer grip also. Simple board games that require moving pieces also encourage fine motor skill development.

By the age of 4 (if not before) children can in participate in a variety of household activities, including cooking, cleaning and gardening. You can judge best what level of involvement in household activities suits your child best.