Activities That Encourage Fine Motor Development

Hands are one of the most important tools that children bring to the classroom. Hands enable a child to physically interact in the learning process, to act on their learning environment and to demonstrate what they have learned. You can help your child to develop these very important motor skills by encouraging play with the following materials.

• ●  String beads, start with pipe cleaners and move to shoe string

• ●  String small pieces of drinking straws on a pipe cleaner or shoe string

• ●  Make pictures with stickers (you can get colored dot stickers in the office supply area of most stores)

• ●  Play tic-tac-toe, connect the dots using stickers

• ●  Use scissors to snip junk mail

• ●  Make play-doh shapes and press beads into the play-doh

• ●  Put Q-tips into small pieces of drinking straws

• ●  Thread buttons onto pipe cleaners

• ●  Put beads onto pipe cleaners stuck into a ball of play-doh

• ●  Use tweezers, training chop sticks, zoo sticks and tongs to pick up objects and sort them into containers such as muffin tins

• ●  Put popsicle sticks or small pompoms into water bottles

• ●  Use eye dropper to make designs on paper towels or coffee filters by coloring spots with marker and then​ putting drops of water on the marker spots

• ●  Make towers- stick a piece of uncooked spaghetti in a ball of playdoh so it stands up straight and have child put cereal o’s on it

Many games and toys facilitate fine motor skills. When choosing toys for children developing fine motor dexterity and writing skills consider the shape of the tools used during the game or activity. For non-writing activities like Tumbling Monkeys and Lite Brite look for small pieces that require a pincer grasp (index and thumb). For writing activities look for thick writing tools, if the tools are small like with the Scratch Magic you can enlarge the tool with a “Jumbo Grip” pencil grip.

• Ants in Pants (Milton Bradley)
• Aquadoodle- Bath Doodler (Spin Master)                   
• Bingo Bear Game (Learning Resources)

• Bed Bugs (Patch)
• Cootie (Milton Bradley)
• Cord Draw (Duck Toys)
• Doodle-Pro (Fisher-Price) – Look for the ones with thick pens
• Don’t Break the Ice (Milton Bradley)
• Don’t Spill the Beans (Milton Bradley)
• Hi Ho Cherry-O (Milton Bradley)
• Inch Worms (Learning Resources)
• Jenga (Parker Brothers)
• Kerplunk/Tumbling Monkeys (Mattel)
• Lacing Cards
• Lite Brite (Hasbro))
• Magnetic Trace’ N Draw (Milton Bradley)                   
• Pick Up sticks
• Rapido (Hape)
• Scatterpillar Scramble (elefun)
• String Along Lace Kit (Educational Insights)
• Stamping Kits                                                                                                               

• Scratch Magic (Scratch art) – Use a “Jumbo Grip” pencil grip on the stick 

• Trouble (Milton Bradley)
• Games such as The Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game by Educational Insights (they have several different animal varieties)