Nov 11, 2010

Mighty Fine Motor Fun

I'm pretty sure that once I am done with Noah's fine motor skills, he'll be ready to split atoms or operate on brains.  That, or at least stay between the lines when he colors.  :) Snapshots of our latest fine motor skill activities...

Look at those bilateral hand skills in action!  Observe how he uses two hands together!  Watching the oil and water NOT mix was the best part of this Moving Bubbles activity for Noah.


Painting with Q-tips and the leftover food coloring solution.  Go pincers, go wrist action!


Even Anna was getting in on the hand-eye coordinating straw jewelry fun.  Ooh and Aaah over the forearm and wrist control!


Reusable stickers/clings offer fun practice for refining grasp and release of small objects.  You'd be amazed how involved peeling, pressing, placing, pushing can be.


More practice with scissors.


This Hide and Seek Play Dough activity turned out to be way cooler to Noah than I thought it would be.  I'd hide a marble in a mound of dough and he'd have to pull, squeeze, mash, smear, rip, cut to locate it.  He was so into this!  He kept doing this himself long after I had left the room.


These are shining examples of how kids learn and develop through play.  Finger coordination and strength improving by leaps and bounds!


I let Noah get his hot little hands on some rubber cement.  Yes, it got messy.  But that boy was spellbound by the dipping, scraping, wiping, smearing of the glue.  In this shot, he was using leftover straw bits to sprinkle on a wreath.   So. Many. Fine. Motor. Skills. Involved.


This stapling turned out to be a flop because he was just not strong enough to staple hard enough so it would release.  But that is kind of the point - building up finger, hand, and wrist strength through more repetition of this.  I'll keep my eyes peeled for a smaller stapler, too.


Today I finally remembered to pick up some golf tees for this Styrofoam Construction Activity that helps the child gain finger strength and eye hand coordination as well as expand tool usage. 


 
This was just an afternoon of playing with Daddy, but I know better now.  All I see are fine motor skills in action!


Lest you think I came up with this stuff, let me just say again - Mighty Fine Motor Fun by Christy Isbell provided all the ideas and information.   Such a great resource!

3 comments:

Memaw said...

What a super mommy you are to provide all this "fun" for your kiddies. I am so proud of our little students.

Emily said...

O.M.G. Kimberly...you could totally homeschool those kids. You get as much fun and entertainment and satisfaction out of all those activities and watching them "get" it as they do! Then you could still use your stinking awesome creative teacher skills. I'm so proud your my sis :) And I love that idea on playdoh and a marble...I may do that simply to keep Natalie busy for a while LOL (see, I'm not homeschooling mom material) :) And Brooklyn told me today as we were wokring on "her" Indian costume project for school, "mommy, you can cut the feathers...cutting with scissors isn't very fun" LOL.

Kimberly said...

Get that girl some of those scrapbooking scissors with all the different pattern blades and she might dig it more. Noah adores cutting and snipping, lucky for me, and I haven't even busted those bad boys out yet!

Definitely put Natalie to the play dough hide and seek. Heck, have Brooklyn do the hiding for her. I just bought you 20 minutes of free time.