Fine Motor Skills. What are they and what needs to be mastered first?
Fine motor skills. Fraser, my 4 year old is all over them..... has been from the time he was little.
He always loved blocks and stacking rings, posting shapes and playing with babushka dolls. We’d spend many a rainy day making and moulding fresh batches of playdough. He could do peg puzzles like a pro at 18 mths ..... mastered the Tupperware shape sorter by 2.
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And now at age 4.5 he loves creating masterpieces from LEGO and making patterns with connecta-shapes. He will spend hours making patterns with the magnetic stick-and-ball things in the below photo. Just recently he has started getting into drawing, dot-to-dots and colouring instead of just scribbling all over the page in black texta. He taught himself buttons and zippers. The kid can do a 100 piece puzzle now. (What the actual?).
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Fine motor skills involve the use of the smaller muscle of the hands, commonly in activities like using pencils, scissors, construction with LEGO or duplo, doing up buttons and opening lunch boxes. These skills are important in that they prep children for writing and, really, any activity that requires a steady hand.
Of course putting pen to paper is becoming less of an everyday requirement these days (when was the last time you penned a letter?) but any trade, a creative pursuit like jewellery making, or even a tattoo artist requires those fine manipulative movements that you can invite your child to practice from as young as 6 months.
You can bet your electrician was good with his LEGO as a kid.
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And I don’t know about you guys, but speed typing is a skill that is in my top 10 achievements of life.
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Speed typing is NE 👏🏻CE👏🏻SSAR 👏🏻Y👏🏻.
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Alfie my 20 month old is quite different in the fine motor skill department. Partly because he is just a gross motor driven kid. But he also just doesn’t get the same 1:1 time with me that Fraser did.
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Can anyone else relate? First born fine-motor genius who can entertain themselves for hours at a table..... second born demon who prefers climbing onto dangerous surfaces and smashing things with the attention span of a gnat?
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However. Hope is not lost for our cute little Alfie.
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One because he’s a shifty little thing and always seems to work out things that he’s not meant to, like how to pull every single texta lid off his brother’s sacred stash, or how to get into the baby-proofed ‘danger drawer’ and sort out all the dangerous items one by one.
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But there’s another major reason.... do you know the MOST IMPORTANT skill a child must master before attempting fine motor skills?
Drumroll please........ ….
It’s POSTURAL CONTROL
(and shoulder strength).
You cannot truly master a fine motor activity without a strong solid foundation.
Postural control is defined as the act of maintaining, achieving or restoring a state of balance during any posture or activity.
Imagine struggling to hold yourself upright in your chair whilst trying to type? Or if all your effort was directed towards standing and balancing on a ladder, whilst you are trying to bang a nail into a wall? It would make your fine motor task incredibly arduous. And you’d probably hurt yourself.
Postural control is crucial to everything we do as humans. From eating, to typing, to playing sport, to changing a tyre.
And postural control my Spider-Man second baby has. He’s a physio’s baby. He’s done a physio program from the time he was born. So at least I’ve given him that.
If you would like to learn more about how to give your own baby that strong solid foundation, that love of movement from start that facilitates strong and healthy movement patterns, go and check out my 10-step baby development guide here.
Now, Fraser off you go and teach Alfie how to do the Tupperware ball thing. Mummy has more blogs to write.