Fine motor skills involve a refined use of the small muscles that control our hands, fingers, and thumbs. These skills enable us to button, draw, and write. Children need to have strength in their hands and fingers before they can hold a pencil correctly. Here are some tools and activities that we talked about and/used last night.

Eyedroppers

Activity 1: Place a bath mat that has suction cups in a water table or in an underbed storage container with the suction cups facing up. Put some red, blue, and yellow food coloring into 3 small dishes and add a little water to each dish.

Have a child use an eye dropper to fill each of the suction cups with the tinted water. Once each suction cup has been filled have the child use the eyedropper to remove the water from each suction cup. You can also use small shaped bath shapes that have suction cups for this activity.

Activity 2

Put some red, blue, and yellow food coloring into 3 small dishes and add a little water to each dish. Cover the work surface with newspaper or a plastic tablecloth to protect the surface. Give a child some coffee filters and an eye dropper and have him squeeze drops of the colored water onto the coffee filters. The colorful coffee filters can be transformed into snowflakes, flowers, etc.

Greeting cards

Cut off the front of used greeting cards and punch holes around the edges of those cards. Use them as lacing cards.