Fine Motor Skills

When babies are born, their brain is not developed enough to control this type of movement. This happens with time, as your baby grows.

Fine Motor skills are simply actions that involve your child using his smaller muscles, such as the ones found in his hands and fingers, to manipulate objects of different shapes and sizes.

By holding a small object between his finger and thumb, your child is using his fine motor skills. But it is not only limited to fingers. By using his mouth to taste different foods, your child is also using his fine motor skills.

When babies are born, their brain is not developed enough to control this type of movement. This happens with time, as your baby grows.

Typically, development starts in the head, and then gradually advances down to the rest of the muscles in the body.

This means that babies gain control of their face, mouth, lips, and tongue first, followed by the rest of their body muscles in time.

Fine Motor skills usually start to develop as your child’s whole body gains stability and mobility as well as with his cognitive and social development. They are a critical part of his development as he needs to learn to use his hands competently to be able to manipulate objects and to acquire self-help skills such as feeding and dressing.

If you notice your child trying to accomplish something on his own, encourage him with positive words of reinforcement and show him different ways of achieving his objective without completing the task for him.

Starting three years of age, your child’s motor, verbal, cognitive, and interactive skills development change significantly. He is now able to listen to what you have to say as well as understand conversations, stories and song lyrics. During the year, his random scribbles begin to look more like recognizable letters and some children may even start putting together “letters” to create words. They become conscious of the uses for writing and may ask adults to write words down for them. Activities that can help in your 3 year old’s Fine Motor skill development:

• Provide him with a string/rope and large beads, and help him thread the beads through
• Help him spoon sand or pebbles from one container to another
• Encourage him to create more complex shapes using playdough such as a multi-layered cake
• Show him how to stack plastic cups of different colors and ask him to imitate your actions
• Write down his name on a paper and ask him to paste stickers on the lines of each letter
• Ask him to pick up thick pieces of paper using tweezers