Understand Your Child

Skill Development - Hand Dexterity ( Fine Motor Skills )

What is it?

Dexterous Hand Skills are known as ‘Fine Motor Skills’. Fine Motor Skills involve the use of the smaller muscle of the hands, such as when doing up buttons, opening lunch boxes or using pencils or scissors. Fine motor skill efficiency significantly influences the quality of the task outcome as well as speed of task performance. Dexterous hand skills require a number of independent skills to work together to appropriately manipulate the object or perform the task.

Why are Hand Dexterity Skills important?

Fine Motor Skills are essential for performing everyday skills like cutting, self care tasks (such as managing clothing fastenings, opening lunch boxes, cleaning teeth) and pencil skills. Without these abilities, children’s self esteem suffers and their academic performance is compromised. They are also unable to develop appropriate independence in life skills (such as cleaning their teeth, getting dressed and feeding themselves).

Building blocks necessary to develop Dexterous Hand Skills include:

• Hand dominance (i.e. using one hand more frequently for precision tasks).
• Bilateral integration (i.e. using two hands together).
• Crossing midline (i.e. crossing the line the runs from nose to centre of the pelvis with one hand).
• Hand division (i.e. using the thumb, index and middle fingers with precise control).
• Finger strength.
• Manipulation of objects.

Confidence in these skills develops with repeated experience of them.

You tell there are problems with Dexterous Hand Skills if the child:

• Has an awkward or immature pencil grip for their age.
• Has messy, slow or laborious drawing, colouring or writing skills.
• Has difficulty (or achieves a messy/choppy outcome) when using scissors.
• Has difficulty performing precise manipulation tasks (i.e. doing up buttons, threading, or tying shoelaces).
• Dislikes precise hand and eye coordination tasks (e.g. construction).
• Has difficulty mastering new fine motor tasks.
• Tires easily when engaged in these task.

When Dexterous Hand Skills are less than ideal, you may also notice:

• Avoidance or refusal behaviours.
• Rapid frustration with precise eye and hand tasks.
• Difficulty performing self-care tasks independently (i.e. age influenced).
• Preference to get others to perform the dexterous tasks for them under their direction, rather than actually doing themselves (e.g. “Daddy, draw me a house”, or “build me a rocket”, with refusal to do it themselves).
• Being verbally very skilled but having difficulty showing this on paper (i.e. writing, drawing or colouring).

What can be done to improve Dexterous Hand Skills?

• Determine which is the dominant hand and reinforce its more frequent use in precision task performance.
• Practice using both hands to perform tasks, not just one (e.g. use the ‘doing hand’ to place the block and the ‘helping’ hand to hold the block construction steady).
• Practice tasks that use just one or two fingers - not all the fingers at once (e.g. ‘poking’ games).
• Enhance finger strength by using pegs and/or clips in play.
• Encourage activity participation instead of focusing on a 'successful' outcome (e.g. rewarding pencil to paper attempts, not whether the drawing actually looks like a car or a house).

Activities that can help improve Dexterous Hand Skills include:

• Threading and lacing, with a variety of sized laces.
• Using tongs or teabag squeezers to put marbles down a marble maze.
• Playing manipulation games, such as ‘Pick up Sticks’ and ‘Connect 4’.
• Play-dough activities (e.g. using the fingers, not the hands as whole, working with the Play-dough up in the air, not flat on the table).
• Construction that requires pushing and pulling with fingers (e.g. ‘Mobilo’, ‘K’nex’ or ’Lego’).
• Storing construction materials in jars with screw lids that need to be opened and closed as the materials are needed.