Guiding Students to Practice Fine Motor Skills With Natural Loose Parts

Fine motor control is a necessary foundation to performing many academic and practical skills, making them central to early childhood education. When teachers use natural loose parts in creative ways, practicing fine motor skills is fun for young children.

“Fine motor” refers to the use of any small muscles, including jaw muscles and muscles that control eye movement. However, early childhood educators are most concerned with the small muscles in the fingers and hands. While most teachers focus on the pincer grasp as it relates to writing and self-help skills, fine motor actually includes a range of motions that influence additional subjects and competencies.

What Contributes to Fine Motor Skills?

The pincer grasp, where the thumb and index finger close together to pick up small objects, is just one of a set of actions children need to master to gain proficiency using the fine muscles in their hands. Another important skill is wrist stability. Wrist stability allows children to manipulate objects without having their hands flop around. It is helpful when using a mallet, wiping a surface, or turning a key in a lock.

Hand-eye coordination and hand strength also contribute to fine motor skills. Matching movements to what the eyes see allows children to thread needles or use lacing cards. Hand strength involves not just squeezing, but modulating the amount of pressure used according to the size, shape, and texture of an object.

In order to transfer objects from one place to another, children need practice with grasp and release and bilateral coordination. For example, stacking a plate in a cabinet requires grasping it with an appropriate amount of force, transferring it from one place to another, and releasing it only when it is securely atop the pile. Some actions require the use of both hands at the same time, which is bilateral coordination. Crossing the midline, which refers to bringing a part of the body across the imaginary vertical line that runs down the center of the body to the opposite side of the body, is an essential bilateral coordination task that is an essential early childhood milestone.

Fine Motor Skills Support Cognitive and Physical Tasks

Children rarely perform one type of fine motor movement in isolation. Rather, several—or all—of these discrete skills are usually combined to help children carry out cognitive tasks as well as physical ones. When children write, for example, they connect their hand’s movement across a page to the letters their brain wants to write using hand-eye coordination and simultaneously employ a pincer grasp and hand strength to create legible marks without leaving holes in the paper. In fact, when preschoolers improve their coordinated fine motor skill, their numeracy and executive function skills improve as well.

While fine motor development is most closely associated with writing tasks, it plays a role in almost every early childhood academic subject. For example, in order to count with one-to-one matching, a child will need to be able to grasp and release in order to line up a set of objects. They will need to use bilateral coordination to move their finger along the line and hand-eye coordination to synchronize their finger movements to their number counts. When children read, they cross the midline with bilateral coordination to track words from left to right. Creating art requires the same pincer grasp as holding a pencil, hand-eye coordination to translate the brain’s ideas into a picture, and, depending on the art medium, hand strength to manipulate materials.

Use Loose Parts to Support Fine Motor Development

When paired with common classroom supplies, small, natural loose parts provide a budget-friendly and strengths-based approach to practicing fine motor skills. They allow for open-ended invitations that encourage creativity and invention and can be adapted to use any number of small nature items, like shells, pebbles, leaves, or sticks. While all of the examples shared in this article employ feathers, you can use this fine motor planning template I created as a framework for designing your own fine motor invitations. 

To practice opening and closing the index finger and thumb in a pincer grasp, children can use clothespins as “beaks” to pick up and transfer feathers from a surface to a container. They may also want to paint with the feathers, experimenting with the many different types of marks made by moving the feather in different ways.

Painting with feathers can work as a wrist stability exercise by changing the orientation of the paper surface. Create a vertical surface for the painting, like an easel, the wall, or clipboards hung from a tree; let children lie on their belly to paint; or tape paint to the underside of a table to let children paint while lying on their back. Another wrist stability exercise would be to press the feathers onto a flannel board or an easel covered with contact paper, sticky side up.

Children can practice hand-eye coordination while threading pony beads onto the shafts of feathers or poking the feathers into floral foam, pool noodles, or the holes of a colander. To switch the poking task to one that involves bilateral coordination, simply have children use the feather shafts to “sew” two holed items together. Scraps of burlap, reusable mesh produce bags, or even hole-punched leaves work well.

Hand strength and grasp and release are best practiced combining the feathers with common classroom tools. Encourage the children to squeeze by setting feathers out with glue and construction paper for collages, or simply let the children cut feathers into smaller pieces. They can use tongs to send feathers down tubes into waiting buckets or collect the feathers in containers that open in different ways—caps that twist on and off, or lids that lift off, fold into a bottom section, or snap on and off.

Fine motor control influences every academic and practical skill that children will learn. Giving children plenty of time to explore small, natural loose parts and finding ways to incorporate different types of movement will help them master this foundational skill.