Motor skills are the ability to move to do the things you want, must and need to do. They are divided into two types:
- Gross motor skills involve large muscle movements, like running, jumping, and throwing.
- Fine motor skills involve smaller muscle movements, like writing, buttoning a shirt, and using scissors.
Developing motor skills is essential for daily activities and overall coordination.
Ways to support your child’s gross motor skills
Supporting your child on a regular basis to practice gross motor activities will encourage their skills to improve. Playing pretend helps children build gross motor skills. They can use their bodies to act like waddling ducks, stiff-legged robots, galloping horses, or soaring planes - whatever they can imagine.
Make moving fun with 10 minutes shake up games. Encourage building and navigating of indoor obstacle courses using furniture, pillows, boxes, or blankets. Create an outdoor obstacle course with rocks, logs, and other garden play equipment. Support your child with balancing by asking them to walk on a piece of string or tape, a low beam or plank at the playground, or a homemade balance beam.
This booklet has lots of ideas you can use to support your child’s gross motor skills. You can find further information to support coordination and motor development at The Pod.
Ways to support your child’s fine motor skills
Activities to practice fine motor skills include; threading, cutting with age appropriate children’s safety scissors, using children’s tweezers or adult cooking tongs to pick things up, craft activities including painting, gluing, peeling and sticking stickers, and peeling fruit. For younger children try making homemade play dough.
Beacon House has produced a number of resources including a Hand Gym video and PDF resource to support fine motor skills which can be found on their website under the heading 'Occupational Therapy'. This booklet also has lots of ideas you can use to support your child’s fine motor skills.
Useful resources
- Fun exercises to support gross motor skills
- Fine motor skills activities from Little Learners
- Cosmic Kids Yoga
- Griffin OT has some great activities.