Category:
Cutting
Cutting is certainly an excellent activity to stimulate children's fine motor skills that are necessary for our everyday activities. When your child has already learned how to cut paper aimlessly into pieces, try to offer him or her a challenge in the form of a template that needs to be cut out as accurately as possible. To make the activity more interesting combine it with coloring and glue the cut pieces together to make a composition.
Skills:
Fine motor skills
These activities include various exercises developing eye-hand coordination. Choose the difficulty level from large movements and objects to small ones according to the child's abilities. In common we practice fine motor skills with children from an early age by playing different games such as building bricks, threading beads, cutting bananas, peeling eggs, tearing paper to pieces, grinding on a grinder and many others. In this category you will find various activities that contribute to the development of fine motor skills using paper and paper templates, but do not require to work solely with pencils and crayons.
Graphomotor skills
Activities in this category are designed to support the development of drawing and writing abilities in children at different levels. To achieve good writing and drawing skills various preparatory exercises are suitable to support fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. When practicing any of them, pay attention to the correct tripod grip, as well as to the correct placement of paper and hand on the table. With the correct tripod grip, the child holds the pencil between the thumb and forefinger and supports it with his or her middle finger. The forearm is on the table and the paper is placed on the left in front of the hand with a pencil (this applies to the right-hander). While drawing or writing, the child ideally engages the entire arm, including the shoulder and elbow. To prepare the hand for drawing some preparatory exercises that engage the whole hand might be needed, e.g. drawing circles, eight signs or other shapes on a large format paper.
Spatial imagination
Activities in this section work either with arrows, or with words up, down, right, left, forward and backward as direction indicators. It is good to emphasize here that they are strongly interconnected and that it is necessary for a child to understand their connections. In more advanced variants cardinal points can be used as direction indicators. It should be good practice to combine these activities with orientation in real space, i.e. by playing various games such as winter or heat, robots (following instructions), or compass-based games.