Below are activities to improve your child's finger strength and dexterity:

1. Roll playdoh into marble sized balls. Try doing it with just your thumb, middle and index finger on your dominant hand. If that is too tricky then use both hands. Once you make all of your balls (20 seems good!) then flatten the balls with your thumb and index finger on your dominant hand

2. Roll playdoh into a long snake. Cut with scissors into small pieces. Make sure your cutting hand and helping hand are in a thumbs up position.

3. Roll playdoh into a long snake. Take thumb and index fingers and pinch the snake along the entire length of it, using thumb and index fingers only.

4. Put pennies on the table. One at a time, with your dominant hand pick the penny up and put in your palm. Once it’s in the palm of your hand, pick up another penny and put in your palm. Once you have five pennies take them one a time and move them back to fingertips and put them in a bank or container. This is all to be done with one hand with no assistance from the other hand. This is called penny translation.

5. Pencil walks. Hold the pencil near the tip as if you were going to write. With one hand try "walking" your fingers all the way to the top of the pencil. Walk your fingers back to the tip again. This is called pencil shifting.

6. Take your pencil and hold it like you are going to write. Flip the pencil with one hand from a writing position to an erasing position. Do not use your helping hand. This is easier with smaller crayons or pencils. This is called pencil rotation.

7. Hang a picture or SIMPLE worksheet on the wall. Hold it up with your helping hand an color, trace or draw. This helps with shoulder stability.

8. Color, draw or paint on an easel.

9. Lay on your belly and coloring, trace, draw, use a magna doodle, string beads, do a puzzle. This is great for helping to improve shoulder stability.

10. When playing a board game use tweezers, tongs or clothes pin to pick up game pieces. For example: Hi Ho Cherry O... take tweezers and when it’s your turn squeeze the tweezers with thumb and index finger and pick up the cherries.

11. Cut pipe cleaners into 1-2 inch long pieces. Fold the edges (so they aren't sharp). Put the pipe cleaners one at a time into the top of a cup with a straw lid.

12. Take a small ball of playdoh, place it on the table, break a piece of spaghetti and break it in half. Stick the spaghetti so it is vertical in the playdoh. Take small beads and put the beads on the spaghetti one at a time. THe longer the spaghetti, the more difficult this is. The shorter the spaghetti the easier it is.

13. Take a nasal aspirator and a feather, pom pom, cotton ball, etc. and squeeze the nasal aspirator and squeeze it to flow the feather.

If any of these tasks are confusing but you are interested in trying them, email me and I will send a picture or video!