By Miss Emily’s R/1 class
This week our blog is all about our Fine Motor skills that we have been developing in our class and its importance to our development.
Fine motor refers to the group of skills involved in the ability to manipulate smaller objects with the hands and fingers, for example, grasping, holding and pinching.
Fine motor development has important implications for student learning and engagement in arts, drawing and emergent writing experiences. Writing progress depends largely on the development of fine motor skills involving small muscle movements in the hand and fingers. Evidence suggests a close relationship between fine motor development and other aspects of language, literacy, and cognitive development.
In our classroom we focus closely on the 3 main areas of development regarding fine motor. These are:
- Whole arm development
- Whole hand development
- Pincer and pincher grips
We do many activities in our class to develop our strength in our arms, hands and fingers. These include; painting, drawing, building with smaller wooden building blocks or connecting blocks, strengthening fingers and practice control, threading with beads (larger objects moving to smaller sized objects as dexterity increases), picking up objects with tongs and tweezer, making smaller objects using pinching with playdough and using smaller rolling movements with fingers.
“I like it because we get to do lots of new activities.” —River
“It’s hard to use chopsticks because the pom poms fall down.” —Leo
“I like digging for treasure with the tweezers.” —Ellie
“I find it tricky to use small fingers to make the paper clip chains.” —Eliana
“It’s hard and I have to try again lots.” —Mason
“It’s fun to use the beads to make patterns.” —Hunter
“I like the threading activities.” —Calvin
“It is tricky to use your fingers a lot and you have to use the tips of your fingers.” —Reed
