Learning through play is one of the best ways to help your children develop their cognitive skills.
It not only encourages them to explore new activities and use their imaginations but it also helps to develop those all important fine motor skills. By helping your child develop their pincer grip, you are helping them on their way to learning how to hold a knife & fork properly and also how to grip a pen correctly.
Here are three, easy fine motor skills activities for you to try with your little ones at home. Each activity will encourage your child to concentrate whilst also helping them to develop their pincer grip. My three year old Bella was completely engrossed.
Peg & Pom Poms
This is such a simple and cheap activity. Pop to any craft store to pick up some pompoms. I ended up buying my wooden laundry pegs on Amazon as I wanted multicoloured pegs. You can be as creative as you like with the set up or keep it simple and group each pompoms and peg by color. The aim of the game is to pick up each pompom by using the peg that matches its color and carefully place it into a cup. Your child does this repeatedly until all the pompoms have been picked up.
Number Fun
This fun and simple activity not only encourages children to use their pincer grip, as the numbers are quite tricky to pick up, it also helps them learn to count. I brought these foam, glittery, stick on numbers from Amazon. Encourage your child to pick each number up and place them into the correct numbered cup. If your child has a good attention span, you could go higher than 4.
Play Dough Monster
You can pick up cheap playdough in craft stores, or why not try making your own, there are lots of recipes online. Make a face using the playdough. Cut up a couple of straws and use these for the mouth. The aim of this activity is to encourage your child to use their pincer grip, by picking up the straws and sticking them into the playdough.
doddl utensils
It’s so important to teach your child how to use a knife and fork correctly. Encouraging them to develop their pincer grip will most definitely help but another useful tool is doddl toddler utensils. This award winning children’s flatware has been specially design to help little ones hold and control their knife and fork which enables them to eat independently. doddl most definitely makes meal times a lot easier. My 18 month old daughter Flo is so much happier now that she can feed herself.
Thanks so much to Mamadoit for this lovely guest blog piece. You can find her on Instagram - mamadoitblog and her blog page is here . Well worth checking out!