Encourage Fine Motor Skills
Teach the pincer grasp. To help your child learn to pick up small items like Cheerios using her thumb and forefinger, stuff an empty baby-wipe container with scarves, and then let her try to pull them out. You can also give her toys that have dials, switches, and knobs.
Embrace his filling and dumping obsession. Your toddler will likely load every toy possible into a plastic bin—only to spill it out and start over. While this activity may seem dull, it takes integrated muscle movements, concentration, and cognitive reasoning. Other ways to boost grip and finger strength: squeezing a wet sponge or looking for toys that are buried in sand.
Let the stacking begin! Your child needs hand and wrist stability to place blocks with control. Large wooden ones are easiest for toddlers to manipulate. Once she gets the hang of it, you can switch to smaller building materials—but hold off on interlocking bricks until she’s at least 2.
Facilitate creativity. Most kids can make a mark with a crayon at around 15 months and scribble by age 2. Big crayons are best for little hands, but you can also give him large pieces of chalk and finger-paints to express himself.
Be patient with utensils. Have your child start using a fork and spoon at every meal. If she makes a mess or struggles, resist jumping in to help—let her try to figure it out on her own.
Build on basic skills. As your toddler’s dexterity improves, encourage him to use both hands to do new tasks. Have him try threading big beads or rigatoni pasta with yarn. And play games like “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” to teach him how to work his hands in tandem.
Encourage Your Child's Creativity
Once you've provided your child with the tools that inspire creativity, stand back and let him loose, even if things are likely to get rather messy. Preschoolers tend to focus more on process than on product. They throw themselves into exploring the properties and possibilities of materials like paint, mud, sand, water, and glue without worrying about the results. In fact, when your 3-year-old proudly displays his latest masterpiece, you should try not to ask, "What is it?" That question may have never even occurred to him.
Instead, admire the work for what it is: "That's really wonderful! Tell me just how you did it." Then, encourage him to explain to you in his own words how he felt and what he was thinking about while he was making it.
The less control you try to impose over your child's creativity, the better. This advice especially holds true when it comes to the hand your child favors. One of the milestones of this age is becoming right-handed or left-handed. In fact, handedness is an important sign of increasing brain organization. By age 4, some 90 percent of children have become clearly right-handed, while the rest have become dedicated southpaws.
The main determinant of handedness is heredity, so it's best not to tamper with your child's genetic predisposition. Left-handers are no less socially acceptable than righties. And when pressure from parents or preschool teachers induces a child to switch, doing so usually takes a long-term toll in emotional upset and poor coordination.
So let your child lead the way. And don't be alarmed if her fine motor skills progress more slowly than her gross motor development. Fine motor skills develop more slowly because the kinds of delicate movements that enable children to manipulate objects (stacking and nesting blocks or putting together puzzle pieces, for example) can be learned only over time with a lot of practice. Unfortunately, while most 3-year-olds will run happily for hours on a playground, few really have the patience to sit and copy a drawing of a circle or a cross over and over. And keep in mind that the smaller muscles of the body (like those in the hands and fingers) tire out more easily than the larger muscles in the arms and legs, so endurance and strength must be built up gradually before your child's dexterity can improve.
There's one more reason why your child's fine motor skills progress more slowly: They are closely linked to cognitive development. In order to build a fort with blocks, for instance, a child must be able to think in a three-dimensional manner. Adding limbs, hair, or facial features to an incomplete picture of a person means that your child is capable of understanding that two-dimensional drawings can symbolize real people. Your child must mentally compare the picture with stored images of what people look like to figure out what's missing from the drawing, and he must be able to manipulate a pencil or crayon well enough to fill in the absent features.