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Child Development
Help Your Child Build Fine Motor Skills
Many of your child’s daily activities—like getting dressed, eating, and writing—require control of small muscles in the hands. We call these skills fine motor skills. Your child can do more things for himself when he has opportunities to practice these skills. There are lots of activities that can increase muscle strength and coordination, preparing children for more advanced skills, from writing with a pencil, using a computer mouse, or playing a musical instrument. Help your child build fine motor skills at home by providing opportunities to...
- Set the table
- Hold knives, forks, and spoons to eat
- Pour juice into a cup
- Wipe the table with a sponge
- Help with meals—stir, shake, chop, cut, and mix
- Get dressed—button, zip, snap, buckle, and fasten
- Use Velcro tabs
- Open and close containers with lids
- Cut with child-safe scissors
- Finger paint
- Use a paintbrush
- Play with playdough
- Draw, scribble, or write with crayons, pencils, and markers
- Put together puzzles
- Place pegs in a board
- Build with small blocks
- Play with puppets
Source: Adapted from "Getting a Grip on Things: Building Fine Motor Skills,” Message in a Backpack, 2010, Teaching Young Children 3 (5): 26–28.
For more information /www.naeyc.org/our-work/for-families
Activity
Playdough Recipe
1 cup water
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1/2 cup salt
Food Coloring
1 tbsp cream of tartar
1 cup flour
Combine water, oil, and food coloring in a large saucepan over medium heat until all ingredients come to a boil.
Mix all dry ingredients: flour, salt, and cream of tartar in a bowl.
Pour all wet ingredients into bowl of dry ingredients and mix with spoon until playdough sticks together and forms a ball.
Place ball of playdough on a plate to cool.
After cool enough to touch knead until smooth.
Store in an air tight container.
Note: you can add any kind of extracts like apple to wet ingredients to make your playdough smell or glitter to the dry ingredients to make it sparkle.
Tips for exploring playdough
- Use household items to mold, shape, and manipulate playdough
- Talk about how it looks, feels, and smells
- Create buildings, animals, or anything else you can imagine
Child Development Skills
Social and Emotional-by sharing and taking turns using props, cooperating to make something together, and feelings proud of their accomplishments.
Language and Literacy-by rolling a long snake then forming letters, telling you about what they are making, and discussing new words, such as cut, chop, and slice.
Fine motor- by using hands, fingers, and tools to pound, push, poke, shape, flatten, roll, cut, and scape, the dough
Let's Read
Simple Yet Powerful Things to do While Reading Aloud
By: Reading Rockets
Most parents recognize the value of reading to a child. Books are a terrific way to share the joys of reading: interesting words, beautiful illustrations, and the keys to unlocking the mysteries of letters, sounds, and words. Recently, several researchers published work that helps us understand that very simple, small actions during reading can have a big impact on what a child takes away from sharing a book with an adult.
It turns out that young children being read to almost always focus on the illustrations. And when they're not enjoying the pictures, they are looking up at the adult reader. The child's eyes almost never look at the print on the page, yet that's where children can learn the most about letters, sounds, and words. To get the most out of a shared reading, encourage your child to appreciate the pictures, and also guide their attention to printed words. Doing so may help your child's reading, spelling, and comprehension skills down the road.
To help direct your child's attention to the print in a book, parents can focus on specific parts of it, including:
- The meaning of the print. This includes pointing out specific words within a book and drawing the child's attention to the print. For example, "Here are the penguin's words. He says, thank you."
- The organization of the book and print, which includes understanding the way pages are read, the role of the author, and print direction. For example, "I am going to read this page first and then this page over here next." Or "This is the top of the page. This is where I begin reading."
- The letters, which includes helping your child know that letters come in uppercase and lowercase, and helping your child learn the names of each letter. For example, "This M in the red block is an uppercase letter. See how this uppercase letter is bigger than these lowercase letters?"
- The words, which includes helping your child recognize some written words, and the match between spoken words and written words. For example, "Let's point to each word as I read it. Ready?"
Parents play such an important role in growing a reader. Keeping up with information like this is a great way to make sure you are doing as much as you can to nurture all the right skills in your child.
The research and specific examples described here come from the original research, which can be found here:
Piasta, S. B., Justice, L. M., McGinty, A. S., & Kaderavek, J. N. (2012). Increasing young children's contact with print during shared reading: Longitudinal effects on literacy achievement. Child Development, 83(3), 810–820.
For more information visit www.readingrockets.org