Set up a finger gym for your children with this bubble wrap activity and help them develop their fine motor skills while they play.
Fine motor skill bubble wrap activity for finger gyms
What are fine motor skills?
Gross motor skills refer to the big movements we make with our bodies, using our arms and legs.
Fine motor skills refer to the movements we make using the small muscles in our hands, wrists, fingers, and toes.
Any activity where children are pinching, twisting, kneading, squeezing, threading, pulling, and holding uses movements that involve fine motor skills.
Children need to develop their fine motor skills so they can fasten buttons and tie shoelaces. Crucially, fine motor skills are also needed to hold a pen and write well, and many difficulties later on with writing can be tracked back to poor fine motor skills.
By supporting our children to develop fine motor skills through play in early childhood, we’re helping build vital skills they’ll need for the rest of their lives.
How to help your child develop fine motor skills
By offering our kids a childhood full of hands-on, active play using things like play dough, paints, and blocks, we’re giving them plenty of opportunity to work through the range of hand and finger movements that are vital for their development.
Daily play times with sensory play, loose parts, and arts and crafts are exactly what children need for healthy development – and NurtureStore is full of simple, fun ways you can offer your children these play opportunities. Sign-up to get my Finger Gym emails using the box below and you’ll always have great ideas for fine motor activities to engage your children
Here’s one you can try this week: bubble wrap popping
Bubble wrap activity for fine motor skills
In this activity children can explore bubble wrap and they can develop their fine motor skills as they pop!
Recycle some bubble wrap and use it to create a fun finger gym. As your children squeeze the bubbles to make them burst they are building up the muscles in their fingers.
Children must be appropriately supervised while playing with bubble wrap.
How to set up the bubble wrap finger gym
Set out one large piece or several small pieces of plastic bubble wrap and show your children how to pop them, if they don’t already know.
This is a fun sensory activity where the delight is in the process of exploring the feel and sound of the bubble wrap.
Let them pop away!
Bubble wrap play variations
:: Use a marker pen to colour the bubbles in various colours. Challenge one child to pop all the red ones, another to pop all the blue.
:: Use a marker pen to write numbers on the bubbles and set math challenges. Pop all the threes; pop all the even numbers; pop everything bigger than five…
:: Use tally marks or dots in place of digits
:: Use a marker pen to write letters on the bubbles and set literacy challenges. Pop all the As; pop all the upper case letters, pop all the letters you have in your name…
:: Add in scissors and invite your children to also work on their fine motor skills as they cut up the bubble wrap into smaller pieces.
More ways to use pipettes for play
Try these bubble wrap ideas to extend your investigation in to arts and crafts:
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