Fine Motor Skills

Many times at IEP meetings, fine motor skills are brought up.  Many are unaware of what fine motor skills are and what skills fine motor skills include.  

Fine motor skills involve the use of the smaller muscles of the hands.  Common activities that use these muscles are using pencils, scissors, building with legos, and doing up buttons on shirts.  Fine motor skills influence the quality of the task outcomes as well as the speed.  Having good fine motor skills requires independent skills to work together to manipulate the object or to perform the task at hand.  

Some skills that fine motor skills include are:

• Academic skills
  • pencil skills
  • scissors skills (cutting)
• Play
  • building with legos, puzzles,
  • dressing toy dolls
  • using a mouse or a stylus
• Self-care
  • tying shoelaces, zipping, buttoning, doing belts
  • eating
  • brushing hair and brushing teeth

Fine motor skills are important for performing everyday skills.  Without the ability to complete these everyday tasks, a child may get lower self-esteem, play time be limited and will be unable to do appropriate independent "life skills" without asking the help of others.  

In my classroom, we do a number of different activities to work on our fine motor skills.  Some of these simple tasks include stringing beads, doing push pin activities, using a tweezers to find letters, and searching for beads in the thera-putty.