Fine Motor Skills
What are they?
Fine motor skills use precise movements, involving the small muscles that control the hand, thumb and fingers.
These skills help children perform important daily tasks like grasping objects, drawing and writing, zipping and buttoning clothes.
Children that struggle with fine motor skills will become upset or frustrated when they cannot complete every day tasks. This can lead to task avoidance as the child experiences it as too difficult.
How CogniBlocks Develops Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills are practised in almost every lesson through working with building blocks.
Children stack, join, arrange and take apart building blocks exercising the muscles important in fine motor control development. They also have the opportunity to manipulate the orientation of the blocks by turning them or swapping them out with others.
Trying out new methods of placing blocks and exercises crossing the midline helps with exercising spatial awareness and improving fine motor control.
Some tasks involve the use of common objects to pick up blocks : for instance the children use pegs or a piece of string to pick up the blocks thereby working on the pincer grip, patience and a steady hand.
The games played help exercise fine motor control and hand eye coordination by requiring the children to balance blocks or small models on rulers and shooting marbles either by finger or using a ruler as a golf stick to shoot them through a makeshift obstacle course built out of the blocks.
Some tasks require the children to copy a model, that is placed in front of the class, onto a piece of paper. The same colours as the blocks used to build the model should be used and drawn in the corresponding positions. This practices copying skills and gives the opportunity to use differently coloured pens and exercises the pencil grip.
Children sometimes design their own pictures by placing the blocks onto a piece of paper and are required to draw the outline of the shapes. The blocks are used as stencils. This practises the manipulation of a pen around objects and copying skills.