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Fine motor skills are critical for children to strengthen as they grow and develop. Fine motor skills are the ability to complete tasks or make movements with the small muscles of the fingers. This can be as simple as grasping a piece of food off of their plate or more.
Activities like this matching game are perfect for helping them strengthen their skills in a fun way.
Fine Motor Matching Game
As children grow up and develop, fine motor skills play an important roll. Strengthening these motor skills will help children have more success with tasks such as tying shoes, coloring, cutting, holding a pencil and handwriting. These are important skills that can essentially be improved upon with games such as this.
We also use clothes pins with these math busy bags!
The best part, for me, is that this game can be created with only a few supplies. First, you’ll need some sort of container. We used recycled aluminum cans, but plastic cups could work too. We also used:
The point of the activity is to match what is on the end of the clothespin to what is on the rim of the can. If you don’t have stickers, you could draw different shapes with different colors, with permanent marker, and it would work the same way.
Put the sticker, or draw the shapes, spaced evenly apart on the top of the can. Put the same number of that design of stickers on the end of the clothes pins.
Mix the clothespins up so that there are a variety of designs and objects for children to pick from.
Have child identify what the object on the can is, then find the match among the clothespins. When the match is found, the child will open the clothespin by squeezing the two ends, put it onto the edge of the can, and release the clothespin ends.
This motion of working with the clothespins is what is strengthening the child’s small finger muscles. Children have no idea that they are working so hard on their fine motor skills because they think they are having straight fun!
You may also like this Farm Animal Pattern Block activity!
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