Fine motor skills – exercises for children | Ergotherapy – Pediatrics

Fine motor skills – exercises for children

Developmental delays in children often manifest themselves through fine motor skills that are not age-appropriate. This can be noticed both in kindergarten and at school. In occupational therapy, the children are practiced on exactly this weakness.

There are many different ways of doing this:

• It can be used for example for handicraft. A child is strongly motivated in crafts, because it produces something, it has created something of its own after the therapy. For example, rattan cane, i.e. basket weaving, is used.

  The child needs a lot of concentration and fine motor skills without being aware of them. The manual dexterity is very much encouraged and trained. There are always different techniques of grasping the fingers.

  Furthermore, working with cardboard and paper is also suitable. Stars or other shapes can be folded, which also trains fine motor skills. Depending on the deficit of the child, workpieces of different degrees of severity can be produced.

• In addition to handicrafts, (therapeutic) games are offered to train fine motor skills.

  Through finger games, the children collect a lot of information about finger coordination and thus an important ability to act in everyday life is created. The fingers make very different dolls or roles, like in a theater. At the same time, this play is accompanied linguistically, in the form of a nursery rhyme or children’s song.A game that can be played well at home and that trains the fine motor skills is the puzzle.

  Only by using the fine motor skills, it is possible to put the individual puzzle pieces into each other. The less this ability is mastered, the larger the individual puzzle pieces can be. For children who are already trained, puzzles with very small pieces are used.

  This shows that it is not always necessary to use a very special game from therapists, but sometimes the child is helped with very simple games, which can usually be found in every household. These include various games where the child has to build something from the smallest possible parts or has to put them together (Lego bricks, metal construction kit mosaic making etc. ).

• The fine motor skills weakness is particularly noticeable in the children’s painting and writing behavior. The child is given special exercises for the pen position, sitting position and for the coordination that painting and writing requires. In summary, it can be said that the therapist addresses the child’s overall personality through his exercises and thus opens up new fields of movement in the context of fine motor skills that were previously inaccessible to the child due to his impairment.