Fine motor skills are skills that require small muscle movements with the hands and fingers in coordination with the eyes to perform precise activities. This coordination with the eyes is also called as eye-hand coordination.
Activities that require eye-hand coordination are scribbling, coloring, writing, cutting, copying, encoding on a keyboard, use of a mouse with a pc, painting, tying shoe laces, doing a jigsaw puzzle, opening and closing objects, buttoning and zipping clothes, eating, pasting, and even turning pages of a book.
The most important concern for parents with school-aged children would be writing. The tripod grip, cutting, copying and control of the pencil and spacing of letters.
At home parents can try to let their children use different materials to write with: colored pencils, markers, pens, chalks, magic slates, finger painting and even drawing on different materials like on the sand, on the soil and with the use of non-toxic bath paints. Just make sure that they know where they are supposed to write and where not to write.
Eye-hand coordination is important in developing the fine motor skills because this will help your child in doing tasks that are necessary in the activities that they do in school.
Developing the fine-motor coordination skills may reduce anxiety later on that might develop when the child has difficulty coping with more demands that come from school activities.
Remember, doing these activities should be fun 
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Information, Snapshots, Teaching Techniques, behavior modification, special education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
