Set up a finger gym for your children with this pipette activity and help them develop their fine motor skills while they play.
Fine motor skill pipette 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: water play with pipettes
Pipette activity for fine motor skills
In this activity children can explore how pipettes work and develop their fine motor skills as they squeeeeeze!
You can buy pipettes in store and online from both craft and medical/science suppliers.
They’re plastic tubes that have a bulb on the end and they’re used for transferring liquid.
How to set up the pipette play finger gym
Set out your pipettes with a tub of water and show your children how they work.
They’ll need to squeeze the bulb to squeeze out some of the air in the tube.
Then place the pipette in the water and release the bulb. Notice how the water is sucked up into the pipette.
To release the water, squeeze the bulb again.
Children can have lots of fun with this, picking up and squirting water. And each squeeze helps them build their fine motor skills.
Pipette play variations
:: Add in containers so they can fill and empty them.
:: Include a measuring jug so they can read the scale to see how much water they can fill it with.
:: Add food dye to your water to make it more colourful.
:: See if your children can place drops of water onto a target.
:: Set out a few tubs of water with different food colouring in and invite your children to explore colour mixing. For example, use blue and yellow coloured water and see if they can use the pipettes to combine the waters and create green.
More ways to use pipettes for play
Try these pipette play ideas to extend your investigation in to art and science:
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