She's So Fine (Motor Skill Mayhem)

Fine motor skills are the actions we perform with the little muscles found in our hands and feet. It takes considerable practice for little fingers to be strong enough to fasten buttons and snaps, control a pencil and crayon, cut with scissors, or tie a knot. We do all sorts of activities and projects that employ fine motor skills and therefore independence, including picking up dirty clothes from the floor with our "talented toes" before throwing them into the hamper. 

Here we see the preschooler in her natural habitat, surrounded by the mess of newspaper scraps she ripped all by herself. Who needs a shredding machine when you've got a three year old?

(I think our facial expressions might technically be categorized as fine motor, as well, and Zelda enjoys playing imaginative games that involve dramatic facial expressions. And dramatic voices. And really dramatic plots.)

Eye droppers are excellent for strengthening the pincer grasp. In this activity, borrowed from the Montessorians, Zelda transferred water from one container (on the left) to another container (on the right). This is a fine motor skill activity as well as a pre-reading and pre-writing activity because it reinforces the left-to-right movements of our eyes and hands when practicing (English) language literacy skills. There was also a discussion about how the water looked yellow in the yellow cup, and Zelda made a prediction that the water would look pink in the pink cup. She was correct, but we double checked our experiment's results with a blue cup, too, because that's what good scientists do. (And yes, she's wearing a crown for this lesson. Princesses like science, too.)