Developing Fine Motor Activities

I’m Kirsty Brocklehurst and I’m a Children’s Physiotherapist and I’m Sally Hillis-Davis and I’m a Children’s Occupational Therapist and we are the Practical Child. We’re going to be sharing some common issues around child development and our top tips for how you can help.

When you want your children to use their hands in a fine motor activity, it’s really, really important to have your children’s feet flat on the ground. If you can’t put them on the ground, you can use a foot block under their feet.

The reason for this is it’s really important for the children to have a stable base of support for their feet to be able to sit really stable and be able to free up their hands to use them. A really good example of this is I’m sitting in a bar stool that moment. There’s no bar in front of me, but I do have a foot bar onto my feet. If I take my feet off here, it makes me feel really unstable and wobbly.

So imagine your children trying to use their hands effectively when they don’t have anything under their feet. If I now put my feet up, I feel much more stable. I can move around quite fluently and I feel really as though I could use my hands well. If I take them off again, you can see just by looking at me how more stable I am.