Toys to help with fine motor skills

Finding the right toys for your children can be a balance between things that are fun and cute, while also being developmentally appropriate. Here are some fun and simple toys to help with fine motor skills for a wide range of children and individuals.

Toys to Help with Fine Motor Skills:

The reality is that almost any toy can be something that helps with the development of fine motor skills. Fine motor skills are the ability to use the small muscles in our hands and forearms for grasping and dexterity tasks, and most toys aim at using these muscles to some degree. In this post we’re going to identify some great toys to help develop these skills, and how you can scale these items to work for your child, depending on where they’re at in their own development.

Sorter Toy:

Sorter toys are a great way to help children identify and match shapes together, while also manipulating the shape in their hand to get it facing the right direction to get the piece into the corresponding hole. For these types of toys, you can start with the easier shapes like the circle, or square, and then progress to more complicated shapes like a star or pentagon as your child progresses!

Making Bracelets with String and Beads:

Stringing beads is another great activity that can be scaled to multiple skills sets. Stringing beads helps develop hand-eye-coordination, and you use all those tiny muscles in your hands to get the beads onto the string. For kids just starting out with this skill you can use large beads on pipe cleaners, and as your child gets better at it, you can move onto thinner strings and yarns with smaller beads. This can be fun for kids as young as three (with supervision for choking!), all the way up to pre-teen age kids!

Reading Books:

While your child might not be reading independently yet, there are still good skills to be learned from books. When you’re reading with your child, give them the opportunity to turn the pages, or let them look through the book on their own. For younger kids you can start with board books, and as they get older and navigating board books becomes easier for them, you can start progressing towards books with thinner pages that are more difficult to turn.

Building Sets and Blocks:

Blocks take a lot of concentration and focus. The child has to stack them just the right way so they don’t fall over. Easy progression for this skill would be starting with larger building blocks and then working your way towards Duplo blocks, and eventually onto smaller Lego sets. Duplos and Legos are especially good for helping kids develop hand strength with pushing the pieces together and then pulling them apart.

Ring Stacker Toy:

Ring stacker toys are another great way to develop that hand-eye-coordination. A simple progression for this skill would simply be getting the rings onto the toy, and then furthering the skill by working on getting the pieces into the correct order.

Puzzles:

Puzzles are a great toy for literally any age and skill level! You can start with wood inset puzzles with simple shapes, build toward inset puzzles where the wood pieces fit together, and then slowly but surely progress to more and more complicated jigsaw puzzles. Puzzles help to strengthen hand-eye-coordination, hand strength, pincer grasp, executive function, motor planning, and so much more!

These are some of our favorite toys to help with fine motor skills, we would love to know some of your favorites in the comments below!