Developing gross and fine motor skills is vital to long-term balance and coordination on both small (fine) and large (gross) levels. Fine motor skills involve the hands, feet, fingers, and toes and include precise movements. Gross motor skills require large, sweeping motions with the arms, legs, and torso and are critical to daily activities. As an educator, you can play a prominent role in teaching motor skills for kids to master both.
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Top 5 Tips for Teaching Motor Skills
1. Encourage Free Play Outdoors
Some of the best classrooms go beyond the 30 desks lined up and facing forward. They extend to the outdoors, making learning an all-day, lifelong experience. If you can help kids see learning as fun and ongoing, you may help create lifelong learners. Bringing the classroom outside is one great way to do just that. One of the most straightforward lessons to teach is free play because you give the kids some rough guidelines and send them off.
Free play can be as simple as running around outside and exploring a playground. You let kids have 30 minutes or an hour to play in whatever way feels good to them. Inevitably, they’ll group together, come up with a game, get organized, and have fun. Along the way, they’ll be jumping, climbing, running, hanging, swinging on a metal swing set, and gathering items from outside. All of these activities involve the whole body and improve gross and fine motor skills.
2. Incorporate Gardening into Lessons
Another lesson you can teach in and outside of the classroom that has multiple benefits is gardening. Getting a garden going with your students can be used to show kids how to care for plants, how to make food, and how and why plants grow, survive, or die. These lessons can be seen as part of science, math, history, and even language arts, depending on how you incorporate them. As a bonus, kids develop gross and fine motor skills as they work.
It doesn’t have to be a huge garden outside, either. You can start seedlings in the classroom and have kids count seeds, count the days from planting to growth, and add water and nutrients to see how the seeds develop. This process involves using the fingers to place the seedlings into the dirt carefully. If you can move the lesson outside, you could involve the hands, feet, arms, and legs to dig and plant in a more extensive garden. Have kids keep a journal as they go to document progress and work on writing.
3. Prepare Food Together
There are few more rewarding lessons than those that involve food. You can teach kids to make a simple meal, and then they get to eat it! As a bonus, if you’re working in a garden, you can use the food they’ve helped grow. These lessons can relate to every subject taught in school, right down to the histories of food from various cultures. And the act of chopping, preparing, eating, and cleaning up after a meal involves both fine and gross motor skills.
Depending on the ages of your students, you could make something as simple as cheese sandwiches with vegetables on the side. As kids grow older, incorporate the use of a cooktop to prepare sauces, grill sandwiches, or make pasta. Have kids work together to come up with recipes they think they’ll enjoy and prepare food for the class. Give them old cookbooks to read and tell the class about the dish. You’ll be stimulating their bodies and their minds.
4. Introduce Play-Doh, Clay, and Paint
You can rarely be too young or too old for arts and crafts. And they’re a great way for teaching motor skills to your kids. Working with clay helps kids use their hands and fingers. Painting with a small brush or with finger paints requires precise motions, and sculpting large objects can even involve the arms and legs. Get creative, and you can get their whole bodies into the mix.
Preschool-aged kids can work with non-toxic Play-Doh and putty, finger paints, and large sheets of paper. Older kids can work on canvas and use sculpting clay for advanced artists. To complement the exercise, you can read books by exciting artists, like Eric Carle, Beatrix Potter, or Sandra Boynton. For older kids, assign reading in art history. These lessons can help kids see the power of art as they work with their bodies to create their own.
5. Teach Water Games
Water is a beautiful way to get kids moving, using their bodies, and learning about an important element. You could teach a lesson on how water is formed on Earth, its place in the human body, or how it’s used in various industries. Meanwhile, you can have kids splash and play in the water on a hot day, filling pools with buckets and pouring water onto thirsty plants to develop gross motor skills.
For fine motor skills, have kids transfer water between cups using droppers or syringes. You can increase the fun by having them race each other and color the water with food coloring or paint. These activities can be taught indoors or outside and will work their minds and their bodies. Plus, they’ll have so much fun getting wet that they won’t even realize they’re learning, which is the best kind of education.
In the end, motor skills don’t exist in a vacuum. As humans require the use of these skills in everyday activities, learning them should do the same. Educators should be teaching motor skills in holistic ways that involve as many other subjects as possible. This way, you’re helping kids in developing not only their physical skills but also their mental and creative abilities. You’re helping contribute well-rounded individuals to society.
