Which skill is an example of fine motor development in early childhood?

Concept

Motor development in early childhood is classified by the size of the muscle groups a movement recruits. Fine motor skills use the small muscles of the hands, fingers and wrists, together with eye-hand coordination, to manipulate small objects with precision.

Gross motor skills, by contrast, use the large muscles of the legs, arms and trunk to move, balance or stabilise the whole body. Vocal and auditory activities are speech or sensory processes and lie outside this motor classification.

Application

Buttoning a shirt is performed with a pincer grip: the thumb and index finger hold a small button, turn it, and push it through a narrow buttonhole while the eyes guide the alignment. Both defining requirements of a fine motor skill are therefore present, namely small-muscle control and eye-hand coordination.

Contrast

• Climbing raises and balances the whole body using the large muscles of the arms, legs and trunk, so it is a gross motor activity.

• Running carries the whole body forward using the large muscles of the hips and legs, so it too is a gross motor activity.

• Shouting is produced by the vocal folds and the breathing muscles; it belongs to speech and language development rather than to the classification of motor skills.

Cross-check

A quick classification test is to ask whether the task mainly moves the whole body through large muscles or manipulates a small object through precise finger control. Buttoning falls in the second group, alongside other early-childhood skills such as holding a crayon, threading beads, using scissors and working a zip.

Therefore, the example of fine motor development in early childhood is buttoning a shirt.