Hello Infant 2 families! I hope the long weekend provided everyone with a reset we all needed after the last couple of months. Kat, Veronica and I have been brainstorming different ways we can continue to help our families during this time of continued uncertainty. Something we came up with is providing you all with some simple, developmentally appropriate activities you can do at home with your infant/toddler. If you do any of the activities, we thought it would be fun if you could share a picture in our Microsoft Teams group. We would love to see the children’s faces engaged in the activities.
All the activities we will share can be done with simple, readily available objects. This week we have a couple of fine motor activities to share with you. Fine motor skills involve using the hand and finger muscles and eyesight in-sync. All these skills built upon each other is what leads to the precise art of using a paintbrush, pencil, and screwdriver in the years to come!
The first activity involves putting straws into an empty plastic water bottle. You can even use thick pipe cleaners for a different sensory experience. While the child is placing the objects inside- talk about the colors of the straws and count how many you put inside. These simple activities also provide endless opportunities for language development.
The second activity uses an empty baby wipes container and any objects around the house that fit inside the slot (chunky puzzle pieces, lids). Please make sure the objects are large enough and are not a choking hazard! Model how to open and close the container to retrieve the objects then watch to see what your child does. Pretty soon your toddler will be able to do it themselves.
Both of these activities as well as many others can be found on https://momentswithmiss.com/
Physical development in children works “from the outside, in” or from gross motor to fine motor meaning that large motor development comes before the more refined, small motor development. Here I leave you with a short article from NAEYC (the National Association for the Education of Young Children) regarding gross motor to fine motor skills from an infant-toddler perspective.
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/blog/moving-and-grooving-infants-and-toddlers
Until next time,
Nadine and the Infant-2 team!
