Teach Fine Motor Skills With Three Fun Activities

Fine motor skills are absolutely necessary for students in order to perform tasks such as pick up and write with a pencil, cut with scissors, moving objects with their fingers, or tying their shoes. Yet these skills have a wide range of ages and development in our students. Also read this earlier post on motor skills for teaching handwriting.

Luckily there are a variety of ways that our students can practice this skill and improve their motor skills. Here are some that you might like.

Fine motor skills activities

Of course, there are many opportunities throughout the day for you to help your students practice, such as zipping up a jacket or sharpening a pencil. But if students are having difficulty with fine motor skills they can easily get frustrated. Activities that are specifically geared toward improving motor skills become very helpful for these kids.

Have a Rice Race!

This is a fun way to practice motor skills. All you’ll need is some uncooked rice, two bowls per student, and two pairs of tweezers. Plastic tweezers work best for little hands.

The containers don’t have to be bowls … but they should be shallow enough so that students can easily get to the rice grains.

Have students use the tweezers to transfer the rice grains one at a time to the empty bowl. This takes quite a bit of manual dexterity! If rice grains are too small you can start with round cereal, pony beads, or hard beans.

Give students a set amount of time. Whoever has the most rice (or whatever you’re using) in the second bowl wins the race!

You can have students play individually and race against each other, or work in pairs to race against the other pairs.

Coloring

Coloring with crayons or markers provides many different types of hand-strengthening and fine motor skills. And the best part is that the more students color the better their skills become.

Coloring in general helps develop these skills, but if you want an activity specifically for fine motor skills, give your students a piece of paper with different sizes of circles on it. Challenge students to stay as much inside the circle as they can.

You can vary this activity by placing the paper on an easel, or by taping it to a wall. Having to color precisely at different angles will also help strengthen their shoulder strength and postural stability.

Sight Words Clothespin Pinch

This activity combines motor skills and sight word practice at the same time!

You’ll need some wooden clothespins, with a letter written on each one. You’ll also need index cards or some other small piece of paper. Each card will have a sight word printed on it, near the top of the paper. Spread the letters of the word out a bit.

Students will find clothespins with the matching letters to one of the cards. Then they’ll place each clothespin on the appropriate letter on the card.

This type of pinching motion helps to improve their strength and endurance when coloring or writing.

Pin Poking

Pin poking is another very beneficial activity to help students increase these skills. I’ve put together a fun resource to engage your students.

Use this Fine Motor Pin Poking Mega Pack to develop the muscles necessary for the correct pencil grip. Children love these challenging, but fun activities! Students can even pin poke the accompanying words too!

BENEFITS

when the push pin is held correctly, the muscles required for grasping a pencil are strengthened
both hands are used, thereby building the habit of using two hands while working
visual attention is required to make sure the pin is exactly on the dot
dots should be close together, so simple spatial planning/reasoning is required
if a child lies on a carpet, trunk and limb muscles get stronger too

Other fine motor skills resources you may be interested in: