Fine Motor skills are important for smaller refined movements like: buttons, snaps, and writing. Strengthening the muscles in your hands is important to developing these skills. It is also important to develop the strength in the rest of your arms, especially the shoulders. Good activities to strengthen these muscles are lying on your stomach while coloring, reading, or watching TV; playing games that require crawling on the floor; or yoga.

Activity / Movement / Other Skills
Spray Bottle Fun

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  • strengthens muscles in the hand
  • encourage use of both hands
  • switch which hand operates the spray
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  • spraying targets (eg: rubber ducks in bathtub) works on eye-hand coordination.
  • practice counting the ducks (or other toys), colors or sizes (“now get the big one”).
  • set up a race, who can get their duck to the end first?

Sticky Yarn for shapes, numbers, letters, or words / Squeezing the glue out of a bottle with 2 hands is hard work!
  • encourage use of both hands
  • help them squeeze
  • have the child make dots with the glue
  • draw a line on the paper and have the child trace it with glue
  • use a glue stick to make it easier
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  • Practicing forming shapes
  • Trace numbers and letters
  • Change positions – try it on your tummy or standing up

Sorting Games

/ Using clothes pins and tongs to move items (eg: pompoms) is another good way to strengthen the muscles in the hand.
  • work on this skill while also working on sitting or standing balance and endurance
  • extra challenge: keep the item in the tongs (maintain squeezing) while walking across the room, and/or stepping over small obstacles with mom/dad ready to catch them, if needed.
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  • work on color matching by putting the yellow pompoms (can get a bag of assorted colors at craft store) in the yellow bowl or a plastic cup colored yellow.
  • work on counting and 1:1 correspondence (important math skill when a child is able to look at the number 2 and put two items with it).
  • make patterns (eg: red, yellow, red, yellow).

Bingo Daubers
/ This is a nice activity for kids who have a really hard time holding crayons, markers and pencils. If your child is working on developing the control in his upper body to make a mark on paper and or stay within the lines of a large picture, this technique can be particularly helpful. /
  • practice forming shapes, numbers and letters.
Website with free print outs:
  • go to Google and search: bingo daubers for more resources and printables

Contact Lisa Barczyk at with any questions2-16-16