Fine motor skills involve the small muscles like that in the hand, fingers, thumb and which contribute to the child learning important skills ahead in life like eating, buttoning, zipping up clothes and then down the line writing, creating with hands etc. The word fine motor skills gets tossed about a lot in normal conversations these days, but I don’t remember really seeing my parents or the earlier generation bothering about whether their babies and toddler spent sufficient time inculcating these skills. But what I have seen and heard is pics and stories of how children would play around the house and garden, picking leaves, sticks and bugs and beetles and even pots, pans and play in the kitchen with grains and vegetables while mommy cooked and went about her daily activities.

Taking inspiration from this, we spent a day letting babyT try and get his hands dirty while he got busy with some fine motor skills activities. The fact that i have come to stay at mom’s place and forgotten to carry his toys and that i badly needed peace for more than 10 minutes, may or may not have had anything to do with it. 🙂 

We started by plucking some flowers from nani’s balcony garden..

I then found some chapati dough from the fridge for him to poke into.

This did not last more than 5 minutes, because babyT hates getting his hand sticky and dirty. 😐

Dipping hands into the rice storage container, looking for ducky and ellie which mommyT had hidden inside.

BabyT loved this activity and he spent a good 20 minutes fishing out the duck and hiding it inside and finding it again..

It was time to clean up so mommyT tried to make babyT help by closing the lids of the jars.

Look at that concentration. 😛

Thinking of making dal and rice for dinner tonight, babyT?

And before the night ended, babyT made an activity on his own.. he found a packet of bindis somewhere and after 10 minutes of silence in the house, was found like this.. 🙂 (there are more bindis in his hair, other cheek and eye. He wouldn’t let me take a pic though. 🙂

 

Don’t let big terms and seemingly unknown concepts scare you. Read up about it and understand them, simplify and have fun. Today was by far one of the best evenings we have spent together and he was happy, engaged and learnt some new textures and patterns too.