As The Growing Patch Preschool educators, we understand how crucial it is for kids to have good fine motor skills. For the rest of their lives, these abilities will be useful to them in various daily activities. It is our duty as early childhood educators to incorporate fine motor exercises into our classroom routines to aid youngsters in developing these critical abilities. The Growing Patch Preschool is a Low-Cost preschool in Fresno dedicated to making your child future-ready. In order to accomplish this, we fully comprehend what fine motor abilities are and how they are created. Searching Affordable preschool near me on google, you are at the right place!!
How do fine motor skills work?
The little muscles in our children’s hands that work together to make small but complex actions are known as fine motor abilities. Carrying out these crucial motions requires both strength and coordination. For example, writing, buttoning a shirt, holding utensils, and turning doorknobs are just a few activities that require fine motor skills in daily life.
Improving fine motor skills at The Growing Patch Preschool
Almost immediately after birth, children begin to acquire fine motor abilities. As kids become older, they need a lot of hand-eye coordination exercises to develop the strength needed for fine motor tasks. To develop these crucial muscles, our teachers at The Growing Patch Preschool offer children a daily hand workout. We are a Low-Cost preschool in Fresno that organize activities for the classroom deliberately so that we can easily include fine motor development in the classroom.
Five Exercises to Strengthen Fine Motor Hand Muscles
1. Pinching
When we instruct our students to use the pincer grasp or a pinching motion, they are engaging key hand muscles necessary for developing fine motor skills. Thumb and forefinger coordination are required for this movement. In the same way that bicep curls would strengthen and grow the arms’ muscles, repeated pinching actions do the same for the hands.
There are several pinching exercises that are readily implemented at The Growing Patch Preschool:
- Picking up little things such as small math manipulatives
- Picking up and moving items using tongs and tweezers
- Inserting clothespins to mark answers.
2. Squeezing
Another excellent activity for developing stronger hand muscles is the squeezing motion. The entire hand is used to open and close. We guide students to engage their hand muscles by squeezing playdough, which is a fantastic way to exercise muscles. Playdough handling exercises their hands with all the gripping, squeezing, rolling, and tearing motions. Using a hole punch, crumpling paper, and squeezing a spray bottle are some additional exercises to enhance the squeezing action.
3. Grasping
At The Growing Patch Preschool, our pupils employ a solid grasp to hold objects firmly on a regular basis. It’s crucial to have the ability to hold a pencil or other writing instrument steadily for a long time. The greatest strategy to increase grasping endurance is to practice it often for progressively longer intervals of time. We provide your pupils the chance to write and paint every day. Pencils, crayons, pens, markers, dry erase markers, chalk, or anything else our children would hold like a pencil are used for these everyday writing and coloring activities.
4. Hold & Control
As our students learn the basic hand movements it’s time to add in the ability to have a steady hold and also control of an item. As the year goes on, we notice our students increasing caliber in their handwriting or cutting abilities. We incorporate fine motor exercises that significantly aid kids with the control component. Lacing games have long been popular among kids. These lacing activities for kids need high precision in order to finish the task, whether it be lacing a basic card, adding beads on a shoelace, or making a necklace out of fruit cereal. Another excellent activity to learn to hold and control an object simultaneously is a little dot painting with a q-tip.
5. Coordinated Movements
Coordinated motions are among the trickiest since they incorporate several different movements. Students at The Growing Patch Preschool, a Low-Cost preschool in Fresno employ a variety of coordinated motions every day in the classroom. Cutting is among the most frequent coordinated movement exercises. It’s quite a difficult motion to use scissors while both holding and controlling the paper with another hand. In addition to perfect fine motor coordination, there must also be perfect hand-eye coordination. Crafts in our classrooms are a great opportunity to combine glue and scissor skills in a single exercise. Two other examples of coordinated motions that are used in our classroom activities include tearing, peeling paper, and applying stickers.
