Developing Motor Skills

Introduction

Another area of development to encourage this year is fine motor skills -- or use of the hands. Just as gross motor skills enable your child to perform important everyday tasks, such as getting out of bed and going downstairs for breakfast, fine motor abilities allow for increasing independence in smaller but equally significant matters: opening doors, zipping zippers, brushing teeth, washing hands, and so on.

When combined with increasing hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills also open new doors to exploration, learning, and creative expression. In fact, research shows that emphasis on purely intellectual activities -- memorization of letters and numbers, for instance -- is far less useful at this stage than pursuits that encourage fine motor abilities and hand-eye coordination. These skills -- rather than counting or reciting the alphabet -- lay the foundation for academic learning in later years. In order to learn to write or draw, for example, a child's hand must be strong and coordinated enough to hold a pencil steady for a long period of time; in order to participate in school sports, games, and projects, dexterity and coordination must be up to par.