Summer Activity Ideas to Promote Fine Motor & Visual Motor Skills

• Painting outdoors makes cleaning up easier. Chris Ted/Lifesize/Getty Images

  Parents and teachers instinctively know that a majority of students lose skills during summer vacation. Fine motor skills like writing and drawing often suffer as do visual motor skills such as hand-eye coordination. Fun and functional summer activities can help students to maintain and even increase their skill levels. These activities are perfect for summertime because many of them require long stretches of uninterrupted time or are best done outside.

Outdoor Activities

• Outdoor activities based around play can build fine and visual motor skills. Drawing or writing with sticks of chalk and using paintbrushes to paint on concrete with water help students to practice handwriting skills. Add five to seven drops of food coloring to a cup of water and freeze in ice cube trays. For a warm weather activity bring the cubes outside and use them to color or write on large sheets of paper. Allow the watercolor pictures to dry and hang in a prominent place.

Messy Play

• Some messy activities are best during the summer when it is easy to take children outside and spray off the messes on them with a water hose. Children can develop fine and visual motor skills by finger painting and cutting and gluing collages or pictures. Spray a small dab of shaving cream on a table and have children spread it out then use their fingers to write or draw in the shaving cream. Let children enjoy digging in the sand or have them use shovels to transfer sand from one area to another.

Creative Activities

• Many creative activities take an hour or more and work best during long summer days. Children can maintain fine and visual motor skills by building with modeling clay or putty, using stickers to create a picture or stringing pasta into bracelets or necklaces. Planning these activities each week will help your children to maintain skills learned during the school year.

Drawing

• Drawing promotes both fine and visual motor skills. It requires children to manipulate a pencil or crayon in order to reproduce a mental picture. Drawing and coloring practice can help to improve a child's handwriting. Encourage children to draw using paint, markers, crayons or colored pencils. If a child is unsure of what to draw ask her to draw a favorite activity, a friend, or even a memory from a vacation. After your child has drawn a picture ask her to tell you about her drawing.