Fine Motor Skills Fun

As a first grade teacher, I discovered that a lot of children (especially boys) are lacking the fine motor skills necessary to have good handwriting.  As a result, they are very slow, reluctant writers.  It is difficult for children with inadequate fine motor skills to focus on the content of their story because the task of physically getting the words on the page is overwhelming.  It is a vicious cycle where writing is hard, so they don't want to write, which means they don't get the practice they need, so writing continues to be hard and on and on.

I knew I wanted to set my kids up for success in school by making sure that they can write comfortably.  Big Brother is not interested in coloring or drawing, so I need to find more creative ways to help him improve his fine motor control.  One way that our preschool teacher suggested is to allow them to use tongs. Our ice bucket came with a set of tongs that is perfect for little hands.  I grabbed a bag of pom poms from the dollar bin at Target for him to pick up.  As he gets better I may switch to beans or cereal.

I gave Big Brother the tongs, an ice cube tray and the pom poms and just let him free explore.  He was mostly interested in piling them up high enough that they would fall down, which was just fine with me!  He started to challenge himself by picking up more than one pom pom at a time.  I was excited to see him challenged but not overly frustrated.  And he was entertained for about 20 minutes!

You could also use this activity to teach colors or practice sorting.  For now, I just wanted my son to get use to the tongs and enjoy the activity so that when it comes out again he will be excited.  I will be back later this week with other ideas for improving fine motor skills.