Back to school is the perfect time to get working on those fine motor skills. Fine motor practice is extremely important in the early years in order to develop the skills needed to do various life activities as well as educational tasks.
Fine motor skills are important in being able to do basic life functions such as eating, picking up toys as well as doing a button or zipper, just to name a few. It is also important to practice and develop these skills in order to be able to successfully write and draw in school.
There are various activities that can help develop these skills, two of which are Q-Tip Painting and Just a dot glue practice.
Glue Practice for Fine Motor Skills
Last year I asked teachers on my Facebook page which they prefer to use in class, glue bottles or glue sticks. The results were about 50/50, some saying that it depends on the project. If we are talking about preschool/kindergarten, the more they can practice with a glue bottle the better. Now there may be times such as maybe they are making a book, and you don’t want all the pages to stick together, so a glue stick would be a better choice. However, any time you can do a project allowing your students to use a glue bottle, not only are you helping develop their fine motor skills, you are developing their hand-eye coordination, patience and confidence. You can check out my blog post about using glue with CRAFTS in the classroom HERE.
One year my preschool class took advantage of the vocabulary they were learning from their Spanish teacher. Every time I reminded them that they only needed a teeny tiny dot of glue they said, “CHICITITO!” For those of you that may not know, chicitito means tiny. Ha, ha, ha! They were so much fun!
Glue dot practice sheets are a fun way for your students to work on developing their fine motor skills. They put one dot of glue on each black dot, then they can cover each dot with either crumbled tissue paper, paper dots or rip-and-tear paper as pictured. I would usually cut the tissue paper into squares, give a bunch to each child and they would smush, smush, smush the tissue and place it on the glue dots.
If you prefer to use paper dots, a shape puncher works great for this type of activity. Ripping and tearing the paper can be a job that the children help you with the day before, in preparation for the next day.
Q-Tip Painting
Q-Tip painting is a great activity to help with fine motor skills as well. Not only do the children need to manipulate holding the q-tip, but their hand-eye coordination gets a workout while moving their hand from the paint to the page and placing it on the dots.
I’ve always enjoyed pairing up my activities to go along with our theme of the week, holiday or season. By doing this, you can repeatedly practice certain skills while keeping WHAT the children are actually doing to practice those skills fresh and new.
What have you done to practice fine motor skills?
Glue dot practice and Q-Tip painting are just two ways to practice these skills in class. I would LOVE to hear what you’ve done in your classroom to help your children develop these ever important skills needed to function both at home and at school. To help you get started, I’ve created a special Back to School FREEBIE which you can get by clicking the picture below!
If you are interested in any of the practice pages that you’ve seen above, just click on the pictures below and it will take you directly to my TPT shop!
The first one is a Back to School FREEBIE!
Fine Motor Practice for the Seasons
Check out this great YouTube video about 10 Fine Motor Skills Activities!
I want to thank you for visiting my page and I CAN’T WAIT to hear how you practice fine motor skills in YOUR class! Don’t forget to sign up with your email address to get all of my latest and greatest blog posts! Have an awesome day!
