Finger Knitting, Fine Motor Skills, And Fp's

[Intellidepth]

Long story short, I wish to help a 4 year old develop fine motor skills for writing/drawing. Child has very short attention span so I need multiple activity types to develop fine motor finger control to alleviate boredom.

 

My son's school holds an annual finger-knitting competition and parents have told me it makes a huge difference to their kid's writing control. (Everyone's finger knitting then gets made into a collective object such as a rug and donated/auctioned.) So that's one idea.

 

What other ideas do you have? Thanks.

 

Edit: forgot to mention that the best fine motor control drawing this child has made was with my heavy metal Jinhaho I brought to a session once - light years ahead of when the child uses pencils or lightweight biros. The child has sensory difficulties, so I suspect the weight made a huge difference to the child's ability to control the nib, and the ready flow of ink meant the child didn't need to apply pressure downward as well as try to control horizontal/vertical strokes at the same time.

Edited November 29, 2015 by Intellidepth

[deepak23]

Maybe a coloring book to be done with colored FPs??

[sirgilbert357]

How about painting with water colors or something similar? Have to use a light touch, and can still promote a tripod grip. If painting a pre-printed picture with color coded sections, it can promote "stay within the lines" type of control over the paintbrush. Downsides are it can be messy depending on the child and paintbrushes are quite light (it seems the heavier Jinhao made things better? So a light paintbrush might be a step in the wrong direction).

[Intellidepth]

A small opportunity to laugh at self. We had a painting session the other day... Water-based Acrylics... it took me 45 minutes to clean up after a 10 minute painting session. Thankfully the wonderful mum usually dresses the child in 'messy' clothing because I rarely specify what activities we may be doing on any current week (impromptu decisions!) and always packs a couple of sets of spare clothes. You see, what I didn't anticipate was the child getting hold of the multiple 300mL acrylic bottles while I was rinsing brushes, figuring out how to open them, emptying them into paint pots and doing an inspirational Banksy on the concrete lol.

 

I shall try ordering a few Jinhaos I think and trying out the other option.

Edited December 23, 2015 by Intellidepth