About the Workshops

Children’s development should be looked at holistically with consideration for how each area of development affects one another. Cognitive (understanding and development), social (literacy and communication), emotional, spiritual, and physical (motor skills) are interconnected with each other. For example, emotional and cognitive work together, and enable the child to develop an understanding of their emotions, and how to communicate to get desired results (for example, crying is symbol of sadness). 

These developmental traits can be developed in many different forms, but today we will be discussing how they can be developed through art.  

Fine motor skills involve the use of the smaller muscles of the hands, such as grabbing, pinching, picking up small objects, and writing. Fine motor skills efficiency significantly influences the quality of the task outcome as well as the speed of task performance. Efficient fine motor skills require a number of independent skills to work together to appropriately manipulate the object or perform the task.

Here are a few activities you can do with your little one to help support and the development of fine motor skills. 

Studio Activity

Q-TIP PAINTING

This experience is great for little hands to work on fine motor development. This experience is also great for social, communication as well as physical development.  

What you Need:

  • Paper/canvas
  • Q-Tips
  • Paint

What you Do:

  • Pour out paint and gather paper. 
  • Use Q-Tips as paint brushes to dot the paper. 

Things to Think About:

  • Talk about how to hold the Q-Tip. This is great practice for working on pencil grip and training those muscles. 
  • Discuss how to combing colors, and how different motions of pushing the Q-Tip on the paper creates different designs. 
  • Discuss vocabulary about emotions and the colors associated with those emotions. Ask your child to paint as if they were mad, sad, happy, etc. Afterwards, have a conversation about how they conveyed those emotions through the painting. 

PLAY CLAY

Play clay is an amazing way to develop fine motor skills in a fun, colorful and creative way! 

What you Need:

  • Play Clay ingredients (Video Recipe) 
  • Cookie cutters, play clay instruments (optiona) 
  • Nature items (sticks, stones, grass, etc.)  

What you Do:

  • Create sculptures using homemade or store-bought play clay to create sculptures. 
  • Use different toys, cookie cutters, or even nature items (sticks, grass, stones, etc.) to build and mold the structures. 

Things to Think About:

  • Discuss the sensory experience while playing with play clay. Expand vocabulary through discussion of texture and colour (rough, sooth, soft, orange, light blue, etc.).
  • Talk about what you are making and how you can achieve that design or idea.
  • Try to make shapes, focus on making them “really big” and “really small” to focus in on fine motor movements.
  • Use rolling pins, nature items, art supplies to decorate the artwork. 

STRING BEADING

This experience is an excellent way to develop fine motor skills since it can be a challenging one! The idea is simply, creating necklaces or bracelets with beads.  

What you Need:

  • String/yarn
  • Varying sizes of beads, buttons, pasta, etc.  

What you Do:

  • Gather string or yarn. Cut off a short piece and tie a large knot at one end. 
  • Using beads, pasta, buttons, etc., create a necklace or bracelet. 
  • Try to use patterns thinking about shapes and colours. 
  • When finished, tie both ends together. 

Things to Think About:

  • Depending on age and skill, you can vary the size of beads to either be more or less challenging. Use a variety of shapes to focus on challenging the fine motor skills. 
  • Talk about patterns, shapes, counting and colours when creating.  
  • This experience is great for working on developing skills used for independence like buttons on shirts and pants, zippers, pencil grip muscles, and hand-eye coordination.