Games To Work On Children’s Motor Skills

Using games to work on children’s motor skills is an excellent and very necessary tool. However, people generally don’t put much emphasis on this until a child starts school. From that age, children are introduced to sports and exercise. However, there the emphasis is more on talent and competition than on their integral development as people.

However, motor skills are essential for the correct biological, psychological and social development of a child. So if we wait until the beginning of education to start working on it, up to five years of opportunity will be lost in a child’s life in this regard.

What is motor development?

Motor development involves a whole series of changes that occur in a person’s motor skills. By performing them, a child will be increasingly able to perform new and diverse motor actions efficiently. In addition, they will come to control the movements of their bodies and adapt better to their physical and social environment.

A person will develop motor skills in a practical way from birth to adulthood. However, it is important to recognize the different evolutionary stages a child goes through in order to provide them with the most appropriate stimulation at each stage of their development.

To make this easier, we are going to group the different games according to the different ages they are aimed at.

Games to work on children’s motor skills

3 to 6 months

First, have your child lie on a rug and give them different colored cups (of a suitable material). Then encourage it to build towers by placing them on top of each other. This simple activity improves your child ‘s fine and gross motor skills and coordination.

Place a musical piano in your child’s crib where the feet are. This way, when lying down, they can ‘play’ the keys with their feet and enjoy the sounds. This musical stimulus will amplify their movements and encourage them to keep going. This movement game stimulates the development of the baby’s gross motor skills.

6 to 9 months: games to work on motor skills

From this age, circuits or routes, with different ‘obstacles’, are an excellent tool. The idea is that the little one will crawl through the various objects. Mats and tunnels are ideal for this, but if you don’t have one, it’s enough to use your imagination and use whatever is fit for purpose.

You can also use pillows at different heights or boxes that are open on both sides. Why not put toys at the end of the route and encourage your child to go there? This activity will strengthen their crawling and improve their gross motor skills.

To work on fine motor skills, it is extremely helpful to give your child small building blocks in different shapes and sizes, for example. While sitting on the floor, they can just play with them, make towers, or stack them any way they want.

9 to 12 months

To improve their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, we can work with small balls of different colors. By placing several boxes on the floor, we can challenge the child to put as many balls as possible in the box within a certain time. Alternatively, we can ask them to put all balls of the same color in a certain box.

12 to 15 months

Choose two small toys with wheels (this could be a car, train, truck, etc.). One for yourself and one for your child. Then, sitting on the carpet, roll your toy so that you map out a route. Your child, with his own toys, will have to try to follow the same path. Then the roles switch and your child maps out the first route and you follow. You can also use large cards and draw on them the path that the toy will follow.

In addition, if we use toys that the child can drag while walking, we work on their gross motor skills and help them learn to walk.

Matryoshka dolls are also very useful objects that can help them develop their fine motor skills at this age. The adult just needs to show the child how to use them and then let the child experiment with it on their own.

These are just a few ideas for activities that parents can do at home to work on their children’s motor skills. Don’t wait for them to go to school to stimulate their motor skills!