Experience Curriculum incorporates many fine motor activities each day into the toddler curriculum. Fine motor activities include scooping and transferring, stickers, playdough, tongs and tweezers, and creative arts. Give toddlers unique play experiences to engage their senses, make learning hands on and keep their attention while they build fine motor skills. Try these five fine motor activities for toddlers.
Scooping and Transferring
Scooping and transferring activities lays a foundation for mastering life skills. These seemingly simple tasks teach toddlers practical skills they’ll use throughout their lives. Pouring drinks, serving food, and handling various objects with precision are all fine motor skills.
Give toddlers the opportunity to scoop and transer in their daily routines and through play incorporating sensory into their play.
Scooping and transferring cereal from one bowl to another helps toddlers refine the motions needed to feed themselves, developing important independence and self-help skills. Toddlers practice eye-hand coordination skills and develop bilateral coordination. Scooping and pouring can also be very calming. Try the Feed the Puppy activity from the Baby Animals theme.
Peeling and Sticking Stickers
Stickers engage toddlers in tasks that require hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, and the pincer grasp.
Toddlers peel and place stickers on surfaces, strengthening hand muscles and enhance dexterity.
Sticker activities also foster spatial awareness as toddlers learn about distance and positioning while arranging stickers without overlapping.
These activities encourage creativity, language development, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. The process of choosing stickers cultivates independence, allowing toddlers to express preferences and develop confidence in decision-making.
READ Benefits of Stickers for Toddlers
Squishing and Squeezing Playdough
As they squish, squeeze, roll, and mold the dough, toddlers strengthen the muscles in their fingers and hands. This enhances their grip and control. Playdough causes finger isolation, allowing toddlers to practice using individual fingers more precisely, which is essential for activities like writing later on.
Manipulating the play dough with rolling pins or cookie cutters, helps refine their hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness. Playdough tools may can support overall fine motor skill development in a fun and engaging way.
Each week, toddlers will be introduced to a new playdough activity that encourages children to squeeze, pinch, and squish playdough. Some activities include hiding objects like keys or shells in playdough and looking for them. The Spider Dough activity picture above, invites toddlers to push craft sticks into a ball of playdough. Extend the activity to include math by counting the legs of the spider as they add or remove them.
Grasping and Holding with Tweezers and Tongs
Tweezers or twongs are simple tools toddlers can use for engaging activities that develop fine motor skills. Children are excited to use them, but what they don’t know is they are refining their hand strength and coordination.
The precise movement required to use tongs or tweezers effectively helps enhance their pincer grasp, needed for tasks like holding pencils and using utensils.
This playful exercise also sharpens hand-eye coordination and concentration, setting a solid foundation for future dexterity and control. Try using large tweezers or tongs to tranfer large pom poms from a basket to a muffin tin.
Tearing, Collaging, Painting and More With Creative Art
Toddlers love to get busy with creative art activities like tearing, collaging and painting! These activities offer many fine motor benefits. READ 5 Ways to Explore Creativity with Toddlers
Tearing paper or tissue requires finger strength and control, refining their grip and precision. As they handle glue and paintbrushes, toddlers enhance their hand-eye coordination and dexterity, learning to manipulate tools with increasing accuracy.
These activities encourage the pincer grasp, which is needed for writing.
Beyond these benefits, the sensory experience of different textures—smooth glue, rough paper—stimulates their senses. Through these diverse creative activities toddlers begin to express themselves through creativity and refine motor control and coordination.
Experience Toddler incoroporates these five fine motor activities for toddlers all month long to continually practice fine motor skills through play.
READ Help Your Child Build Fine Motor SKills
