Growth and physical development

Gross motor skills are large movements your child makes with their arms, legs, feet, or entire body. For example; crawling, running and jumping are gross motor skills.

Gross motor skills can be challenging for many children for a number of reasons:

Lack of experience or practice.

• Difficulty using two sides of the body together (bilateral integration).
• Reduced balance caused by poor core stability
• Difficulty planning and organising themselves to follow instructions
• Poor spatial (space) awareness skills

In many cases, supporting a child on a regular basis to practice gross motor activities should encourage their skills to improve.

Games and activities can be introduced to your child at any time throughout the day. Try to create lots of opportunities as this can be very helpful for your child’s gross motor development.

• Regular practice (five to ten minutes each day) will help your child improve their skills.
• Encourage your child by providing praise and encouragement for their efforts and success.
• Start easy and gradually make tasks more difficult for example, if your child is having difficulty with knowing where parts of his/her body are knowing left and right, start by doing activities which focus on body parts. Once this is known, start introducing left and right.
• Make it fun!

Motor planning tips

• Consistency – Practice new tasks in the same place with the same materials each time
• Repetition – Repeat the same task for several days or even weeks, with each repetition, remain consistent.
• Demonstration – In group situations, allow your child to watch his/her peers complete a task first. This will provide the child with a visual demonstration and more time to learn how to do the activity
• Support verbal instructions with visual demonstration
• Even if you are only extending a task or changing it slightly, assume that the child is learning a whole new task from the beginning.
• Encourage the child to talk his way through an activity for the first few times, create rhymes, this will help the child develop their planning and doing skills
• Clear short instructions – Use only one command at a time
• Go at the child’s pace – If a child is not ready or willing to learn a skill, it will be much harder to teach. Teach one step at a time making sure the child has some success no matter how small
• Praise all efforts – Often a child will put huge amounts of effort and still not complete a task
• Successfully - it is important to praise efforts rather than results
• Try to balance assistance and independence – encourage your child to do as much as they can for themselves
• Provide opportunities for activities that are matched to the child’s needs and abilities
• Consider activities that are not competitive, self-paced, and group-optional, as these can help boost self-confidence - some children do better learning new skills individually or in small groups

Bilateral Integration

Gross motor skills are large movements your child makes with their arms, legs, feet, or entire body. For example; crawling, running and jumping are gross motor skills.

Bilateral integration is using both sides of the body together. It is an important foundation for the development and co-ordination between right and left sides of the body and effective two-handed coordination. Tasks that the child may find challenging include cutlery, tying shoelaces, completing buttons or zips.

Here are some activities that can be done during play and home activities that help to develop bilateral skills:

• Washing the dishes: Start off with practising on the pots, make sure the pots are on one side of the sink and that when you wash them you use one hand to scrub the pot and one to hold it. Finish by lifting with both hands and putting on the drainer so you can dry them
• Dusting and wiping: This is best done on a large surface like a table or wardrobe or doors. Using a cloth in both hands wipe the surface trying to reach as far as you can and stretch as far as you can with both hands particularly moving from side to side. Keep your feet in the same place on the floor and just use your arms. Go upward, downward and side to side
• Rolling out play dough: Sit or stand to do this activity. Use both hands to roll the dough flat. You could put the cutters into the dough and use the rolling pin to push the cutter into the play dough. Remember to use your full reach
• Pillow fights: Remember to hold the pillow with two hands, this activity naturally encourages movement of the arms across the body to reach your opponent
• Raking in the leaves garden: Rake the leaves up around you using both hands. Try and stand in the one place and make a big pile of leaves
• Play ‘Simon Says’: Imitating postures that emphasise crossing midline, diagonal, and alternating motor movements

For more help 

If you’re seriously concerned about your child’s movement, talk to your health visitor or GP.

Our fine motor skills are how we move our small muscles and are needed to complete a number of activities, such as writing, cutting with scissors, dressing, brushing our teeth and hair and feeding ourselves.

What you might see

If your child has difficulty with their fine motor skills, you’ll notice that they struggle with:

• Writing
• Drawing
• Playing with construction toys
• Cutting with scissors
• Threading beads
• Putting together jigsaw puzzles
• Doing up buttons, zips and shoelaces
• Using a knife and fork
• Washing and drying their hands
• Opening packets

How you can help

Palmar grasp and release

This is one of the first stages of a child’s development and is a building block for all other fine motor skills. To help them develop, try:

• Squeezing water from sponges at bath time
• Posting toys, e.g. shape sorting toys
• Squeezing play dough
• Scrunching up paper into balls
• Stacking blocks on top of one another
• Throwing objects

Once they’re confident with these activities, you’ll notice that their grasp starts to change and they begin to move their wrist too. Continue developing this grip with activities such as the below, making sure activities are age-appropriate for your child:

• Pushing / pulling toys
• Row, row, row your boat
• Tug-of-war
• Tipping water from a beaker or pouring it from one container into another
• Holding onto the rope of a swing
• Holding onto the handles of a tricycle

Pincer grip

Your child will also develop a pincer grip. This is a more precise grip and means they use their index finger and thumb to pick up, hold and release an object. To start with, your child will use their thumb and the side of their index finger. It’s important to help them develop this grip as it’s used for holding a pencil or scissors, handwriting, and functions like doing up buttons, zips and shoelaces.

Activities you can try to help them develop and refine the pincer grip include:

• Using tweezers to pick up objects and dropping them into containers
• Threading beads
• Pinching, squeezing, patting, poking and pulling at playdough
• Pulling toys using a string
• Using lacing and sewing boards
• Picking up small objects - rice, beads, marbles, raisins and lentils - between the thumb and index finger and placing them into containers
• Tearing paper into strips
• Peeling off small stickers to make into a picture
• Turning pages in a book
• Making paper chains
• Playing with Fuzzy Felt sets
• Playing games with clothes pegs
• Making pipe cleaners into shapes, objects or animals
• Popping bubble wrap
• Games with small pieces that require manipulation such as Connect 4, board games, spray bottles

Finger isolation

Your child will also develop the ability to point with one finger at a time. This ability will help them further develop their pincer grip and pencil grip and is important for handwriting, using scissors, doing up buttons, zips and laces and using a knife and fork.

Activities you can try to help promote finger isolation include:

• Drawing in a sand tray or shaving foam with a finger (please be aware of skin conditions such as eczema that may be irritated by this activity)
• Flicking a ping pong ball or cotton wool ball using fingers
• Playing with finger puppets
• Finger rhymes, e.g. “Round and round the garden like a teddy bear” or “Incey Wincey Spider”
• Pressing beads or poking holes into playdough using each finger in turn
• Dialling the numbers of a toy telephone
• Water pistols

Hand arches

Hand arches let your child shape their hand so they can get a strong hold on different objects. It also helps with controlling pressure and skilled movements of their fingers. If these arches aren’t developed fully, your child could have difficulty using objects like knives, forks, pencils and scissors.

Activities you can try to help develop hand arches include:

• Shaking dice using a cupped hand
• Cutting playdough using a plastic knife
• Writing with a tiny chalk on a chalkboard using 3 fingertips including the thumb
• Using playdough to make balls and pressing them into the palm of the hand
• Using tweezers or tongs to pick up small objects
• Activities with buttons, coins or small objects
• Playing card games

When to ask for help

If you’ve tried all of these techniques and you’re still not seeing any improvement after four months, please ask nursery/school staff for advice. If necessary, they can then refer you for further support.