Fine Motor Skills at Christmastime

Christmas is a great time to encourage your children to practise simple fine motor skill activities, like cutting, gluing, stapling and taping. Here are a few ideas to get little fingertips working…

♥ Cutting straight(ish) lines is great practise for little ones just starting out with learning to use scissors. Try cutting strips of wrapping paper (which is nice and thin and easy to cut through) together to use for making paper chains. Stapling the chain ends together requires lots of motor skill co-ordination too.

♥ Another fun, festive cutting (and folding) activity is making paper snowflakes to hang in the window.

♥ Provide a collection of small, empty boxes with some squares of Christmas wrapping paper, scissors and tape and get wrapping.

♥ Have a stamping good time with some Christmas inspired stamps (you can easily make your own with self adhesive craft foam and a wooden block), a stamp pad and large sheet of paper.

♥ Even sitting bubs can practise motor skills, just pass them a loosely taped parcel to unwrap or collect the used wrapping paper and show them how to rip it into smaller pieces.

♥ Make festive confetti with decorative hole punches to dress your Christmas table.

♥ Why not set up a simple Christmas card making station like this one I made for Immy to play with…

You could include;

• Scissors
• Tape on a tape dispenser
• Stapler
• Glue or a glue stick
• Christmas stickers or stamps and stamp pad
• Decorative punches and/or fancy edged scissors
• Glitter glue
• Christmas wrap cut into a variety of shapes and sizes
• Gift tags
• Lightweight card in varying sizes
• A range of envelopes
• Felt tipped pens, crayons or other drawing/writing implements
• If you kept your Christmas cards or gift tags from last year, cut out the Christmas pictures and include them for collage

… all of which can inspire creativity, and encourage fine motor development and pre-reading and writing associations.

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