Using Loose Parts Play to Practice Fine Motor Skills
Photo by Renee Mitchell
A recent Edutopia article looks at creative ways to use loose parts in early childhood education in order to make practising fine motor skills fun for young children. In the article, Nicole Dravillas Fravel explores how young children can develop physical and cognitive abilities through creative activities.
Whilst the term “fine motor” refers to any of the body’s small muscles, including those of the jaw and eye, the ECE focus is primarily on the small muscles of the fingers and hands. The pincer grip, where the thumb and index finger close together to pick up small objects, normally the primary focus, is only one of a set of actions needed to gain proficiency in hand and wrist manipulation. Hand-eye coordination.development of hand, and bilateral coordination are also key components of fine motor skills development.
The author notes: “While fine motor development is most closely associated with writing tasks, it plays a role in almost every early childhood academic subject. For example, in order to count with one-to-one matching, a child will need to be able to grasp and release in order to line up a set of objects. They will need to use bilateral coordination to move their finger along the line and hand-eye coordination to synchronize their finger movements to their number counts. When children read, they cross the midline with bilateral coordination to track words from left to right. Creating art requires the same pincer grasp as holding a pencil, hand-eye coordination to translate the brain’s ideas into a picture, and, depending on the art medium, hand strength to manipulate materials.”
The article offers a number of suggestions for using natural loose parts, paired with common classroom supplies, to provide a budget-friendly and strengths-based approach to fine motor skills development practices that are fun for children. “Loose part” items can include “any number of small nature items, like shells, pebbles, leaves, or sticks. The article focuses on ideas using feathers and provides a downloadable Fine Motor Skills Planning Template at https://wpvip.edutopia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/fine_motor_planning_template.pdf to develop a range of ideas using other natural “loose part” items.
To practice opening and closing the index finger and thumb in a pincer grasp, children can use clothespins as “beaks” to pick up and transfer feathers from a surface to a container. They may also want to paint with the feathers, experimenting with the many different types of marks made by moving the feather in different ways.
Painting with feathers can work as a wrist stability exercise by changing the orientation of the paper surface. Create a vertical surface for the painting, like an easel, the wall, or clipboards hung from a tree; let children lie on their belly to paint; or tape paper to the underside of a table to let children paint while lying on their back. Another wrist stability exercise would be to press the feathers onto a flannel board or an easel covered with contact paper, sticky side up.
Children can practice hand-eye coordination while threading pony beads onto the shafts of feathers or poking the feathers into floral foam, pool noodles, or the holes of a colander. To switch the poking task to one that involves bilateral coordination, simply have children use the feather shafts to “sew” two holed items together. Scraps of burlap, reusable mesh produce bags, or even hole-punched leaves work well.
Children can practice hand-eye coordination while threading pony beads onto the shafts of feathers or poking the feathers into floral foam, pool noodles, or the holes of a colander. To switch the poking task to one that involves bilateral coordination, simply have children use the feather shafts to “sew” two holed items together. Scraps of burlap, reusable mesh produce bags, or even hole-punched leaves work well.