Games For Developing Children’s Motor Skills

Games are a great way to develop children’s motor skills from the first months of a child’s life.

Motor skills are important for a child’s biological, psychological and social abilities to develop as optimally as possible,  so it is important to start early. Here we suggest some activities you can try with your child from three months and up.

What is motor development?

Motor development involves a whole series of changes in a child’s ability to  control his body’s movements and adapt to the physical and social environment.

A person develops his motor skills in a practical way from birth to adulthood. However, it is important to know the different stages of development that a child goes through in order to provide the most appropriate stimulation in each individual stage. To facilitate this, we will therefore group the different games according to appropriate age groups.

Games to develop children’s motor skills

3 to 6 months

Lay the child down on a blanket on the floor and give him or her several different colored jars or mugs (of suitable material). Then encourage the child to build towers by placing them on top of each other. It improves your child’s fine and gross motor skills and coordination.

Place a small toy piano in the child’s crib where his or her feet are so that he or she can “play” on the keys with his or her feet. This musical stimulus will improve the child’s movements and encourage him or her to continue. It encourages the development of the child’s gross motor skills.

6 to 9 months

From this age onwards, obstacle courses or courses with different “stations” are an excellent game. The idea is that the little one will crawl through the different stations. Carpets and tunnels are great for this, but if you do not have any, it is only your imagination that sets the limits; use what you have at home that is suitable for the purpose.

You can also use pillows in different sizes or drawers that are open on both sides. Why not put a toy at the end of the track and encourage your child to move towards it? It will strengthen your child’s ability to crawl and improve his or her gross motor skills.

To develop fine motor skills, it is extremely beneficial to give your child small construction toys in different shapes and sizes. When the child is sitting on the floor, he or she simply can not help but play with them, build towers or stack them at will.

9 to 12 months

To improve your child’s fine motor skills, you can play with small balls in different colors. By placing several containers on the floor, you can challenge the child to put as many balls as possible in them for a certain period of time. Alternatively, you can ask your child to sort all the balls of the same color in a specific box.

12 to 15 months

Choose two small toys with wheels (it can be a car, a train, a truck, etc.) – one for yourself and one for your child. Then you sit on the carpet and roll your toy so that you mark an itinerary. The child, with his own toy, must try to follow the same path. Then you change roles and the child now marks the path and you follow. You can also use large pieces of paper and draw the path that the toys will follow on it.

If you also use toys that the child can pull up when he or she gets up, you contribute to the development of the child’s gross motor skills and help him or her to learn to walk.

Matryoshka dolls, or Russian dolls, are also very useful objects that can help children develop their fine motor skills at this age. The adult only needs to show the child how to use them and then let the child experiment and play with them.