Fine Motor Skills

Many parents don't think about building fine motor skills in their children. These are skills that build your child's small muscles (mostly in the hands) that are needed for writing, using a computer, grasping small objects, and fastening clothing. Boys tend to have more difficulty in this area than girls. 

Here are some ideas for helping your child build fine motor skills at home. You can draw a circle with liquid glue on construction paper. Give your child a small cup filled with fruit loops or cheerios. Have him/her pick one out at a time and press into the glue on the paper to complete the circle. To make it even more challenging have them do this with chopsticks or plastic tongs (you can find these on Oriental Trading along with a great motor skills game called "Feed the Animals"). Playdoh is another good way to build motor skills. Rolling, cutting, and creating different objects with the doh is fun for kids! Lacing beads and cards are helpful. A fun little game for older toddlers is the old wind-up fishing game. I just bought "Shark Fenzy" which is a new form of the game. I've also seen them at Walgreens. For the computer there is a fabulous mouse for practice. I bought it on Amazon and its called "CTMO Computer Mouse".  There are some great websites for building mouse skills as well:

http://www.fungooms.com/     http://www.yukyuk.com/yy_johnnyskank.shtml   https://wbx-files.s3.amazonaws.com/jacksonpollock_by_miltos_manetas.swf     http://www.kidspsych.org/eyes.html     http://kids.aol.com/games/be-a-detective/    



 

Scavenger Hunts

I found a simple scavenger hunt online and printed it off. It was mostly objects found outside around the neighborhood (a stop sign, squirrel, fire hydrant, mailbox, and a bicycle). I put the checklist of pictures on a clipboard and off we went. This was just a fun way to entertain my child as well as introduce some new vocabulary for everyday objects and explain what they are. He loved this activity. Since then, we have done all kinds of fun scavenger hunts. This is a great link with different kinds of scavenger hunt ideas for you to do with your child. 

http://www.scavengerhuntsforkids.com/

                        

Get in Shape

Shapes can be tricky. Which ones should you teach? I started with a lot. I have a fabulous book that I used as my reference. You could easily print off a picture of each shape. I showed my child the page and we went on a "hunt" around the house for things that were those shapes. We started with circles. We made a pile of cheerios, bath rings, a coaster, my hoop earring, etc. Then, we went on to squares and made a pile with a picture frame, slice of cheese, a napkin, etc. Triangles were next: a magnet, a Dorito chip, pie server, etc. Rectangles, stars, hearts, ovals, crescents, semi-circle, and diamond. We did a couple of shapes a day this way and made piles.  After he could identify each shape, I had him go around the house and find one of each shape and place it on top of each shape in the book. I think this is important to match them. When we were out and about running errands, I asked him what various shapes were for the "real" world connection. We did shape puzzles as well. I cut out various shapes from construction paper and let him make things out of them and we glued them to a larger sheet of paper. We made an ice cream cone with a circle and triangle, a bulldozer with a rectangle and semi-circle, and a fish with the triangle and crescent.  I also found a shape printable online. I cut out the shapes and taped them on windows, walls, and doors around the house. My son had to go and find them, name them, and stick them back on the corresponding shape on the paper. He loved doing this! Any kind of game!

Not just black and white...

When teaching my child colors (just before he turned 2), I decided to start with a color wheel. I bought one but you can easily download and print one. http://christinafowler.com/blog/free-color-wheel-download/ I started with red and we went around the house and pointed to things that are red. Then we did blue, green, yellow, black, white, brown, orange, purple, pink, and grey. The next day, we talked about the colors again and read Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I got out the color wheel poster and said, let's go find things that are red and bring them back and put them on the correct color on the wheel. We did this little game for several days with each color. The only color my child had difficulty with was gray. It isn't as common as the other colors. When he had all his colors down, we did gold and silver. Then, we did it all over again the next week in spanish. This kiddo knows his colors! We later made a rainbow with fruit (strawberries, blueberries, green melon, mandarin oranges, pineapple, purple grapes, and yogurt for the clouds).