Fine Motor: 15 Top Fine Motor Tools for Handwriting and Pencil Grip

This article provides tools and resources to help your child develop their fine motor skills for handwriting and pencil grip. Affiliate links are provided for your convenience. Integrated Learning Strategies (ILS) is a learning and academic center. As a reminder, ILS is not a health care provider and none of our materials or services provide a diagnosis or treatment of a specific condition or learning challenge you may see in your child or student. If you seek a diagnosis or treatment for your child or student, please contact a trained professional who can provide an evaluation of the child.

There are many children with or without learning challenges who struggle with fine motor development, pencil grip, handwriting, and strength in the hands, wrists and fingers. Because our kids use their fine motor skills every day at home and at school to tie their shoes, fasten their buttons, cut with scissors, and write with pencils, it’s important to help them develop these important skills so they can perform their daily tasks.

Development during the Earlier Years

Many parents ask what tools and resources can help develop their child’s fine motor skills when they are younger. To help you get started, here is a list some beneficial toys for fine motor development. There are many fine motor activities and toys available for kids, however, Melissa and Doug’s toys are some of the best because they provide a combination of fine motor development with math skills, letter recognition, hand dominance, directionality, hand-eye coordination, visual planning, and proprioception.

Because many of these toys encourage your child to use keys, shapes, numbers, magnets, hammers, threading, and fastening, they provide more opportunities for your child to learn. In addition, fine motor toys and activities help your child’s brain develop and can also improve their visual skills and attention and focus.

In Kenneth Lane’s book Developing Ocular Motor and Visual Perceptual Skills he says, “A cause of deficiencies in children’s handwriting may be the inadequate control of the various muscles involved in movement execution. Handwriting is carried out with a variety of coordinated movements, and the child must be able to control spatial, temporal, and force requirements of the task.”

Toys for Skill Improvement

Here are 15 of our favorite toys from Melissa and Doug’s that can help improve your child’s fine motor skills.

     

Cutting Fruit Set                         Latch Board

       

Pounding Bench                 Shape Sorting Clock

           

See and Spell                          Suspend Game

             

Basic Skills Board                     Shape Sorting Cube

            

Lacing Beads in Box             Pattern Blocks and Boards

           

Self-Correcting Letter Puzzles  Wooden Chunky Puzzle

           

Doorbell House                         Wooden Tool Set

Slide Out Xylophone

 

Handwriting Exercises for Big Emotions and Hand Strength

To improve your child’s hand grip strength, emotional grounding, fine motor development and skills for reading and writing, the Rewiring the Brian Handbooks may help. They provide instructions and fun activities to help children build their cognitive development for higher learning.
Both handbooks, beginner and intermediate, provide parents, teachers, Occupational Therapists, Pediatric Therapists, and educators with several fun, playful learning activities to ignite learning. The handbook includes some of the following features:

• Instruction to Rewiring the Brain
• How handwriting exercises benefit your child’s learning development
• Line exercises for letter development and recognition
• Mazes, dot to dots, tracing, coloring, hole punch activities and more
• Curves, boxes and shapes

Each digital handbook targets a child’s emotional and educational development. It is based on the level of the child instead of their age. You may have a child who is 8-years-old, but is still at a beginning level.

• Rewiring the Brain Part I Beginner Level – 63 pages of exercises and activities
• Rewiring the Brain Part II Intermediate Level – 40 pages of exercises and activities

Activities should be done for at least 20 minutes per day. Repetition and practice is key. All activities require adult supervision in the beginning and can be used in conjunction with music therapy and gross motor development if needed.

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Integrated Learning Strategies is a Utah-based center dedicated to helping mainstream children and children with learning challenges achieve academic success. Our services provide kids with non-traditional tutoring programs within the Davis County, Kaysville, Layton, Syracuse, Farmington, and Centerville areas. Areas to find Integrated Learning Strategies include: Reading tutors in Kaysville, Math tutors in Kaysville, Common Core Tutors in Kaysville, Tutors in Utah, Utah Tutoring Programs