Each year it seems my students need some extra practice to build and enhance their fine motor skills. These 8 simple activities will help all learners build their fine motor skills in a fun way.
Each year it seems my students need some extra practice to build and enhance their fine motor skills. These 8 simple activities will help all learners build their fine motor skills in a fun way.
My storage units have 8 separate drawers, each one with an activity that 2-4 students could comfortably complete together. We use these drawers each morning when my students enter the room. They pick a drawer and sit down and get right to work! This frees up a little time for me to check folders and attendance and all of those other morning things.
First up, the Nifty Nuts & Bolts. My students practiced twisting and turning the bolts and matching up the shapes. The bolt stems are different diameters, so my students had to figure out which nuts would fit on each one by testing them out.
Next we used the Clay/Dough Plungers to push and squeeze out dough in fun shapes and squiggles. My students loved learning how much pressure to apply with their thumbs to help squeeze the dough out!
We then used our pinching muscles to hold onto the Dough Rollers and pushed and pulled them to flatten out the dough. The Dough Rollers are just the right size for their little hands. They were able to quickly roll out flattened dough shapes that were the perfect size for pretend cookies!
To help us practice pinching, we used the Learning Resources® Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set™and lots of colorful Tiny Pom-Poms. I added number stickers to the front of the Mini Pails to show my students how many Tiny Pom-Poms to drop in each one. They all had their tongues out and were in deep concentration as they worked to pick up just the right amount of Tiny Pom-Poms to drop in each Mini Pail! < The Fish-Shaped Ring Toss Water Games were one of our favorites. In fact, I couldn't pry them away from my husband and son either! They all loved pushing the buttons on the front to make the rings soar to the top of the game. I could see an increase right away in their fine motor skills, as they were better able to control how high the rings went before landing them on the seaweed. Another favorite of my 13-year-old son and a whole crew of 5 and 6 year-olds was the re-purposed Noise Putty. I placed three containers of each color of Noise Putty into a larger container and added some alphabet beads. I used a larger container so there would be more room for my students to reach in and practice their grabbing and pinching skills as they sought out alphabet beads. The alphabet beads quickly became covered by the Noise Putty, which made them tougher to see but made my students work that much harder to retrieve them! My students all loved the bead and pipe cleaner drawer, where they got to string beads on pipe cleaners and create bracelets. They honed their pinching and grasping skills as they worked to string beads, and even got to take their bracelet creations home with them. In the last drawer, I added a few more Clay/Dough Plungers and some Beginner Scissors along with some dough. I love the Beginner Scissors for practicing those crucial opening and closing motions needed to successfully use scissors, but also because they don't have blades. The Beginner Scissors "blades" are all plastic and are shaped like blades and cut beautifully through all kinds of dough and clay. I encouraged my students to take big and little bites out of the dough and to cut small squares and large snakes. We had tons of fun building our fine motor skills! What ideas do you have to build fine motor skills?
