Improving your child's fine motor and gross motor skills

Hi, I'm Kendra. I'm a Physical Therapist at the University of Michigan Milestone specializing in Pediatric Rehabilitation. I'm here to share with you today some ideas to improve your child's fine motor and gross motor skills all with things that you can find lying around your house so let's get started. One of the skills we work on most frequently in physical therapy is balance and I really found that a basic 2 x 4 is a great way to improve balance with a kid. So you can ask your child to walk across the balance beam, so go-ahead Greg walk across the balance beam. And now if you're out in the community, you could use a curb or even cracks in the sidewalk to improve balance, good. And if that's too easy, have your child start again at the beginning, come on over here, and you can increase the challenge by having them walk across the balance beam, and pick up objects from the ground, or step over things, so go ahead. Very good. Step over there and pick those objects up. You can also do things like even playing a game on a balance beam to increase the challenge of this activity.

Another skill that we work on frequently in therapy is dynamic balance, which refers to a child's ability to stand on uneven or wobbly surface. So we've got Anna here on a kind of a squishy foam but you can easily use like a couch cushion or a pillow. We've upped the challenge with Emmy, she's standing on a pool noodle, and this would be great to work on maybe while you're watching TV, during commercials, or while you're playing a board game. Another great way to work on finger and hand strengthening is Play-Doh and you can buy it commercially or even find lots of recipes online to make your own.

You know the great thing about Play-Doh is almost all activities require a use of two hands, which is an important skill for younger kids. So first, let's take our Play-Doh and roll it into a snake, so we're going to keep our fingers straight and roll it back and forth. Good, nice and long. And now, we'll take our snake and stack it up, and smash them into a pancake as hard as you can. Push them together as hard as you can, squish, squish, squish, squish; good. To further work on these fine motor skills, you can hide small things like beads into the Play-Doh, roll it up, and then have your child try to pick out the treasures.

Another great skill to work on over the summer is hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is good not only for sports and play activities but also for fine motor like copying words down from the board. So a great rainy day activity is balloon tennis and you can make your racket out of a spatula or a paper plate taped to a paint stirrer. Now see how many times your kids can hit the balloons back and forth without letting it hit the floor, go-ahead guys. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, we'll go to ten. Oh, nice job, very good. For fine motor skills, one of the biggest goals is to work on finger and hand strengthening and we like to do that with a game called feed the monster.

And so what you're going to do is you're going to take a tennis ball, can I see your ball for a minute Anna, and use a utility knife to cut about a two-inch opening and then have your child decorate the face around the lips. You're going to have your child hold the ball right on either side of the lips, give it a big squeeze, and then put something into his mouth. Our monsters at a Milestone like to eat pennies but you can feed your monster whatever you like at home. As you can see, it doesn't take expensive toys or equipment to work on your child's fine and gross motor skills at home, a little creativity can go a long way. If you have concerns regarding your child's fine or gross motor skills, be sure to contact your pediatrician.

For other great summer activities, please visit www.mottchildren.org/camp. .