Thinking Zebras
Pediatric Occupational Therapy
Fine motor movements use smaller muscles of our body. In the exercise above the child is feeding the frog using one hand to squeeze open the frog’s mouth and the other hand to get the food in it's mouth.
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What are Fine Motor Skills?
What are Fine Motor Skills?
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Fine motor skills are the skills that require the use of small muscles of our bodies, more specifically the small muscles of hands, to perform controlled precise movements.
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Although the muscles required may be small, but these skills help children with some very important everyday things. For instance: brushing teeth, getting ready, organizing the book bag, opening containers, playing with toys, coloring, cutting, writing, typing, and the list goes on.
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When the activities get complex, these skills require precision, problem solving and lots of patience.
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Some of the conditions that can impact fine motor skills are: developmental delays, cerebral palsy, down syndrome, sensory processing disorder, autism, dyspraxia, ADHD etc.
Why Are Fine Motor Skills Important?
How To Identify If Your Child Needs Support In FMS
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If your child avoids age appropriate self care tasks such as getting ready in the morning - buttoning, zipping, shoe tying, packing homework folders in backpack.
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If your child fatigues quickly and complains of pain in hands during tasks such as coloring, drawing, cutting and writing.
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If your child verbalizes that they are not good at drawing or they hate writing.
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If you notice that your child is showing labored and sloppy outcomes during daily tasks of managing their belongings, or cutting, coloring and writing.
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If your child has good ability to express ideas verbally but is not able to write them down.
If You Suspect Delays In Fine Motor Skills
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The lack of fine motor skills is usually first identified when the child enters elementary school, where they are required to work more independently in managing their belongings (opening closing lunch box), organizing the materials in their book bag and learning to hold the pencil & write. In school, children spend a good amount of time writing, and research shows a high level of correlation between FM skills and handwriting legibility. If you or your child's teacher notice any delays or concerns in the areas mentioned above, request a consultation with the school's occupational therapist.
Listed here are some of the common factors known to impact fine motor skills that your child's Occupational Therapist (OT) will look into. They may conduct a standardized evaluation to identify factors affecting your child's fine motor skills. They will observe your child in the classroom during activities such as coloring, cutting, and writing, as well as during lunchtime, where they will assess how your child manages their lunchbox and uses utensils. Additionally, the therapist will interview the classroom teacher and parents to gather more insights. Based on all this information, the therapist will establish goals and target them in treatment sessions. They can also create a home program with activity suggestions for parents to reinforce skills at home. Furthermore, therapists can collaborate with teachers to provide strategies for classroom support.​
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These skills help children gain independence in daily routines.
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As children get better at these skills they gain confidence, which helps build self esteem.
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In younger children, these skills promote active and creative play with toys.
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In school aged children, these skills support academics and participation in school projects.
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In young adults, as their precision, speed, timing and dexterity improves, these skills allow them to acquire new hobbies with friends and family.
How Can An OT Help?
Ideas For Home Activities
Parents can play an important role in teaching these FM skills in a naturalistic setting of home. Everyday routine activities such as dressing, tying shoe laces, eating, packing backpacks, etc are embedded with repeated opportunities to practice FM skills. By encouraging children to be independent in their daily chores, parents can help foster these skills from early on.​
Rubber Band Activity
​Activity targets: Finger isolation and motor planning
Items needed: Medium to large size rubber bands and household cartons of varied sizes. ​​
How to do: Give your child 10 or more rubber bands and ask them to stretch and place them one at a time over the carton. Use smaller sized cartons for smaller children. Show them how to do it, and take turns to do it with them to make it more fun and engaging. You can do this activity along with your child, which will make it more fun for them and will provide them with the opportunities to learn if they are struggling. To up the challenge use a timer to see how much faster the child can do it. Or Use bigger cartons to see if they can make the rubber band stretch a bit more.
Activity targets: Grasp, precision and control of hand movements.
Items needed: Pom poms or small sized cotton balls, a small jar and tongs suitable for your child's hand.
How to do: Ask the child to pick up 10 or more cotton balls and drop them in the jar one at a time. Show them how to use the tongs. Watch them so you can help correct them.
Can you identify how the child is compensating in this video? Instead of opening and closing the tong to pick up the pom pom, the child is squeezing it between the thumb and the tong and carries it to the jar. Although very smart, but the child is avoiding to open & close the tong, which is little harder and requires use of more coordinated small muscles of hand.
Pick up & Release With Tong Activity
Crumple the Paper Activity
Activity targets: Bilateral coordination, strengthening arches of hand and visual motor skills.
Items needed: Used magazines and a basket.
How to do: Teach kids how to tear a page using both hands; one hand to stabilize the magazine and the other to tear. Tearing is a hard activity for kids, so remember to be patient while teaching! Next, ask them to use both hands to crumple the paper and make it in a very tight ball and toss it in a basket. Take turns with your child to see who can score more baskets! To challenge the kids, ask them to crumple the paper with one hand and toss. When using one hand, children often use their bodies to provide support to help crumple the paper. After they have tried the activity a few times, ask them to not use their body and just use their hand.
Hand Strengthening/Frog Activity
Activity targets: Grasp, bilateral coordination, and hand strengthening.
Items needed: Froggy Feeding Fun Toy. ( Avaliable on Amazon)
How to do: Show the child how to squeeze the frog to open & close its mouth. Allow the child to practice using both hands first. It can a little hard , so allow your child to practice before starting the game. Once they get comfortable, ask them to keep the frog's mouth open with one hand and feed it with the other hand. Throw the dice to see how many flies and of what color to feed.
Letter Formation With Paint Activity
Activity targets: Fine motor skills, pencil grasp, letter recognition & formation.
Items needed: Standard sized paper, a marker, cotton ball, washable paint, & clothes pin.
How to do: Form a large sized letter on the paper and place dots on the letter. Teach your child to open & close the clothes pin. Then have them pick a cotton ball with it, and dip it in the paint. Guide your child to place the paint on the dots, guiding them in the sequence of letter formation.