Fine Motor Friday - Prewriting Skills

Occupational Therapists study occupation. What is the occupation of a child? Simply put, it's play. Learning and growing in the area of fine motor development is crucial to a child's development of play and ultimately helps facilitate their later ability to be a successful student.

By profession, I'm a pediatric occupational therapist although I spend pretty much all my time being a mom. Boo is now 3 years old and it is getting easier to pull out some of my work stuff and start working on fine motor skills. It helps me too because I get to dust off those distance corners of my brain and start thinking OT again. Let's explore development and have some fun.

Prewriting -
There are lots of fun ways to work on prewriting skills. I recently pulled out these wood pieces from Handwriting Without Tears (HWT). I use a lot of their material for writing practice.



I should tell you that these are intended to practice capital letters but as you can see I broke the rules a little. Forming capital letters is much easier than forming lowercase and should be worked on first. Another great thing you can work on are the concepts of "top", "middle" and "bottom". I have found the best way to start working on these concepts is on your own body and have your child model it. For example, "put your hands on top of your head", "where is your middle?", "your toes are at the bottom of your body". You get the idea. Forming letters involves knowing where top, middle and bottom are and many letters start at the top. In fact, the HWT program has a song about "always start your letters at the top".

Using something tangible helps with these concepts too. You can touch them, move them and physically identify the top, middle and bottom of the pieces. I also likes how it simplified letter formation to "little lines", "big lines", "little curves" and "big curves". Boo picked up these terms easily and had fun finding the different shapes.