Fine motor skills are the coordination of movements of your child’s small muscles — typically involving fingers and hands synchronization with their eyes. These skills require your child to use these small muscles to perform different activities or tasks. If your child has attention and learning disabilities, they may have difficulty with these essential skills.
You can help your child understand how their body works and become more independent by giving them tasks that will help them develop their fine motor skills. Below are some fun holiday fine motor activities your child can participate in to help them enhance these skills.
Red and Green Paper Chains
While a bit “old school”, paper chains are still fun to make. They are an easy and frugal way to have your child create a lot of Christmas color to your home this holiday. Have your child either cut their own paper strips from colorful construction paper or you can purchase packs of paper strips already cut out.
Having them cut their own paper strips will help build their scissor skills. Now, have them fold the chains together and paste.
Snowflake Ornaments
Your child can use white and blue pompons, clear beads and silver sequin snowflakes to create a wintery themed ornament. This is a fun project that will keep your child busy as they create sparkly and pretty ornaments they can hang on the tree this holiday.
Christmas Cutting Tray
An important part of strengthening and fine-tuning your little one’s fine motor skills is developing good skills with scissors. Have your child cut out different sizes, shapes, and colors to fill up a big tuff. Then, they can glue them on a piece of construction paper to create a festive Christmas Collage.
There are many different ideas you can come up with to help your child develop their fine motor skills. Your child’s pediatric occupational therapist can give you other ideas for some creative and useful activities and games to encourage strength, coordination, and dexterity in your little one’s hands and fingers. They’ll have so much fun creating their own little holiday masterpieces.