A Teacher’s Guide to Fine Motor Skills for Young Learners

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Are your students struggling with basic skills such as buttoning or zipping his or her coat, building block towers, or cutting and pasting? These are all signs that their fine motor skills aren’t as developed as they should be. Fine motor abilities help children coordinate their hand movements and are critical to building other learning skills.

Children start to develop fine motor skills many years before they enter our classrooms. Just as babies learn to use their pinchers, our young learners are learning to

Use safely scissors
Paste objects onto paper
Hold and use pencils or crayons well enough to color
Finish puzzles with at least five pieces
Build with blocks
Use a zipper
Button and unbutton

The development of these skills is an important foundation for the success of other important skills in the future such as writing, drawing, and self care.

As with other areas of development, we play an important role in providing activities and resources to help our students develop their fine motor skills. A lack of fine motor skills can lead to learning and attention issues later on. As teachers, we want to do everything in our power set our children up for success.

The best way to set our students up for success is by offering multiple, creative, ways for them to develop these skills. I like to combine developing fine motor abilities with other learning opportunities.

As our young learners are developing fine motor skills they are often also learning to identify and form the letters of the alphabet.

With this outcome in mind I created Fine Motor Alphabet Activities for young learners to practice both skills in an engaging way. As a teacher I know we have a million things on our never ending lists I wanted the activities to be teacher friendly with very little cost for materials or prep work! Most of these activities can be printed out and used year after year!

Develop Fine Motor Skills Through Learning

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A good place to start is by having students fill in the letters. This is a great activity for pre-k and kindergarten students. There are a lot of different ways they can fill the letters in.

You could supply a basket of some fun erasers and having them simply place the erasers inside to build the letters. I pick up seasonal erasers at the Target dollar spot but I have also found them at Amazon!

An always engaging option for students to help build hand and finger muscles is to roll out Play-Doh “snakes” and fill in the letters. Play-Doh never gets old for our young learners!

Using tweezers is an excellent way to develop thumb-forefinger pincer grasp while manipulating small objects like mini pom poms to fill in the letters. Being able to squeeze the tweezers and place the pom-poms is both challenging and rewarding for little hands.

The next activity focuses on correct letter formation and writing skills. Have your students start by tracing the letters with their fingers to learn proper letter formation. If you have parent volunteers or an assistant, an excellent option would be to use hot glue over the letter so your students have a tactile experience with the letter.

Students will also have an opportunity to follow the letter formation arrows to correctly to build or trace the shape of each letter before using the starting dots to write their own letters. Using dry erase plastic pockets makes this an easy to prep center that can be used over and over again!

Finally, you can have advanced young learners do more precise handiwork. Students will enjoy using a Q-tip to paint the little circles in the letters. Developing this fine skill takes a lot more hand-eye coordination. A great enrichment for students who have already mastered
the lower level fine motor abilities.

If Q-tip painting is too difficult, have students start by using dot markers and filling in bigger circles with dot markers. These pages could be saved so each student can make an alphabet book.

Develop Fine Motor Skills Through Creativity

Letting your students use their own creativity is one of the best ways to build hand-related skills. Giving students freedom to build the letters using their own creativity helps them grow on multiple levels.

Students will love having a choice to find different ways to build the letters. They can use beads, wiki sticks, stickers, and even
Legos to build letters. Being able to grab these small objects and purposefully place them helps children build hand-eye coordination.

Develop Fine Motor Skills Through Playing

Young learners need play time just as much as they need formal classroom learning, maybe even more so. You should be intentional to make time for your students to explore their hand-related skills through play.

At such a young age, most children aren’t thinking of end results. For example, they don’t see a block and think, “I should build a house out of those.” Instead, they begin to stack blocks and go until they can’t stack them any higher. Their purpose isn’t to be the best four-year-old architect, but to learn what happens when they stack.

These everyday experiences help children build fine motor skills without pressure.