What are Motor Skills?
Defined as the actions and movements of the muscles in the body, motor skills are generally categorized into gross motor and fine motor groupings. Involving larger muscle groups and body part movements, gross motor skills are used in the action and coordination of the legs, feet, arms and torso. We need gross motor skill development to be able to move our bodies to roll over, crawl, sit, walk, run, hop, skip, jump and swim. Fine motor skills involve the smaller muscles and movements of the body, such as the actions we take with our hands, fingers, wrists, feet and toes, while they also include the lips and tongue.
Healthy fine motor skill development allows greater dexterity proficiency, giving us the ability to synchronize the movements of our hands and fingers with our eyes. Controlled by the nervous system, our levels of manual dexterity are complex and it is through more highly developed fine motor skills that our intelligence and development continue to accelerate. Fine motor skills are necessary for writing, typing, picking up objects, holding objects and even for blinking the eyes.
Both gross and fine motor skill development is crucial in learning coordination along with a host of other important physical and mental skills. While most toddlers won’t need much encouragement to exploring gross motor skills like walking and running, they may require some guidance for practicing fine motor skills that require small and more precise hand-finger-thumb-wrist movements. If a delay is experienced with fine motor skill development, this can negatively impact other areas of the child’s development as well.
Fine Motor Delays and Impairments
There are a number of reasons why fine motor skills are delayed or may become impaired. Congenital deformities, developmental disabilities, disease, illness and injury can all play a part in adversely affecting fine motor skills. Specific disabilities and problems affecting the spinal cord, brain, joints, muscles or nerves can also detrimentally affect fine motor development and function.
Physicians, physical therapists and occupational therapists often perform assessments on children to test and determine their fine motor skill development level. These testing protocols often include force matching and grip force matching tasks (the child is asked to match the level of force applied to a finger, or to copy the level of the grip force), the Visual-Motor Integration test (VMI-R, to determine possible learning disabilities that may be affecting visual perception or causing poor hand-eye coordination), and the Peabody Developmental Scales (PDMS, to evaluate the child’s development of hand-eye coordination, overall finger dexterity and ability level in grasping a variety of objects).
There are definitive warning signs to be aware of, and to talk to your child’s physician about, regarding slow or impaired fine motor skill development. If your child is demonstrating difficulty with controlling body movements that involve the face, fingers and hands, or is frustrated by tasks like using a zipper, folding clothes, drawing lines, holding a pencil or cutting with scissors, it is recommended to seek out professional therapy and rehabilitative help to improve these fine motor skills. Very young children who have experienced delays with sitting up or learning to walk may also have a propensity to poor fine motor skill development as well.
Poorly developed or impaired fine motor skills not only frustrate and impact the child on a physical level, but also directly correlate to the hindrance of further advancement in language and mathematics skills, ultimately retarding the cognitive and social processes. Fine motor skill weaknesses often translate to the affected child not learning how to perform basic personal care tasks like personal hygiene and dressing, eating, writing legibly, turning book pages or using a computer.
Targeted Toys to Improve Fine Motor Skills
As a practical strategy for fine motor skill improvement and healthy development, specially designed toys are often quite helpful in achieving success and meeting motor development goals. Not only do these toys encourage finer manipulation skills, but they also enhance learning skills. For example, toy blocks used for stacking involve the physical fine motor skills, but the children playing with them also start learning what to do with the blocks, planning out actions.
Children learn best through play, so here are a few basic fine motor skill toys and activities to help you determine the best kinds of developmental toys for your child’s special requirements:
Dumping Out and Filling Up
As one of the most basic activities your child probably already engages in regularly, dumping out a container of anything is naturally fun for youngsters. While dumping doesn’t take much precision, learning how to refill the container does require good fine motor skills. Even the dumping part is educational for your child as this teaches cognition: your child starts to realize that one object can hold another, and that some objects can also be emptied out of another. Many toys feature smaller objects that can be emptied out from another larger object, while simply allowing your child to remove toys from a trunk, pieces from a puzzle, or pegs out of a pegboard and then learn how to put them back is great fine motor therapy in itself.
Stringing, Sorting and Stacking
Building blocks are a wonderful basic toy for improving fine motor skills in young children, and a popular one that is available in numerous configurations and formats. Whether it’s a pole for colored rings, interlocking pieces or big blocks for stacking, this is a great way for kids to improve finger dexterity along with building and sorting skills. Snap-together beads and other similar toys introduce stringing skills, while multiple colors, shapes and sizes of blocks, magnets or other toys help teach your child sorting skills.
Pinching and Poking
Because young children love to explore their senses, anything that they can touch, taste or smell gives them plenty of fun material to develop better fine motor skills. Nontoxic clays and their attendant modeling equipment are a great way to engage children with rolling, molding, shaping and punching the clay, having a ball while they effortlessly build fine motor skills. Tactile toys that squish and squeeze are also wonderful fun for kids while they help them learn better sensory-motor skills.
Scribbling, Writing and Drawing
Big sheets of paper, coloring books, crayons, pencils and washable pens, markers and finger paints are pretty much an absolute must-have when it comes to children and the healthy development of fine motor skills. Not only does drawing or scribbling with a crayon improve holding and grasping fine motor skills, but this activity also expands the imagination and heightens visual acumen. As an alternative to using paper or coloring books, chalk for the sidewalk or crayons and paints made for the tub will also fascinate your child while simultaneously teaching fine motor skills.
Where are Fine Motor Toys Used?
Aside from the home environment, fine motor toys are often employed for a variety of applications in therapy/ rehabilitation facilities along with special education and mainstream classrooms. Most therapists agree that the hand should be prepared before the introduction of writing implements, so many children with developmental delays may require specific therapy before they learn to grasp a pencil or crayon. Children on the autism spectrum and children with other special needs and sensory-motor challenges may have conditions that make activities involving fine motor skills more difficult.
Fine motor toys often help engage even the most unreachable youngster, stimulating the senses and promoting healthy sensory integration along with helping them to develop and refine fine motor skills. Because these are the skills we continue to develop and improve our entire lives, every child, regardless of ability or non-ability, will benefit from improving their fine motor skills early in life. This is why so many physicians, therapists and teachers utilize fine motor toys in their practices and curriculum, to fully engage the child with fun, while at the same time providing them with a way to improve their developmental skills.
Hulet Smith, OT
Rehabmart Co-Founder & CEO
ck
