Motor skills are the coordination of small muscle movements which occur in the hand, usually in coordination with the eyes.
Most people develop motor skills as they grow and learn to use their hands and fingers for tasks such as writing, drawing, and buttoning clothing.
Some children, however, may have difficulty developing fine motor skills and may require occupational therapy to help them improve these skills. Motor skills are further classified, into fine motor skills and gross motor skills. Let’s see the difference between them.
Gross motor skills
Gross motor skills are when children learn to make movements with all their muscles and joints. So it’s things like walking, crawling, running, jumping, climbing, and anything where they need to use all their muscles and limbs in a coordinated way. Often gross motor skills are related to their core strength.
Fine motor skills
Fine motor skills are sitting up straight, do they have good control of your gross motor skills? Often:to have good, quality, strong fine motor skills, you need to have solid gross motor skills.
So for fine motor skills, we’re looking at things like how children hold their pencils, whether they can cut with scissors. do they hold their utensils properly when they’re eating? So it’s how They use the smaller muscles in their hands to coordinate more precise and accurate motions.
Motor skills in kindergarten
Children in kindergarten spent about half of their day engaged in fine motor
activities. They spent a great percentage of time in paper and pencil activities.
“Children in kindergarten spent 36%–66% (mean of 46%). For children in kindergarten, 42% of total fine motor activity time involved paper and pencil activities”.(Marr, D., Cermak, S., Cohn, E. S., & Henderson, A. (2003).
The higher mean percentage of time spent in fine motor activities in kindergarten classrooms and their results show the importance of fine motor skills.
How to develop fine motor skills
If kids have difficulty with their fine motor skills, there are many things that you can do as a parent to help improve them. Sometimes it’s sitting down and playing a board game, playing, or finding an arts and crafts activity that works on them using those smaller muscles of their hands to do something fun. Some children may have poor coordination, and they may have difficulty with their fine motor skills, but it comes down to their function and how much it differs from other kids of the same age.
In developing fine motor skills, parents and teachers have a huge role. The first condition is to check the School readiness of motor skills. Six fine motor skills activities for kids Suggested By Amanda Morin are,
● Play-dough and putty
● Painting
● Playing with sponges
● Rice races
● Water play
● Gardening and planting
Developing fine motor skills is an integral part of kids’ life. It gives them self-esteem and confidence. Not only that; as per the research of the National Institute of Health, it has been found that focusing on developing fine motor skills results in better achievement in students at kindergarten. This helps in the development of cognitive skills as well. Hence developing fine motor skills should be given more priority; in the kindergarten curriculum.
