Tracking infant hand (fine motor) and communication skills: birth - 18 months

Track your infant's fine motor development from birth to 18 months. Identify the hand activities your infant can do and identify activities that need some extra practice.

Encouraging early looking, reaching and grasping (0-4 months)

From the first weeks infants take a great interest in what their hands are doing. They also very quickly start to try and reach people and objects that come within reaching distance. Providing your infant with opportunities for this early exploration will promote the development of an I-can-do attitude and confidence in his/her ability to interact with, and influence the world.

How to set up a play gym for encouraging early looking and reaching

A play mat (play gym) with places for suspending toys provides a wonderful environment for infants to practice their looking, reaching, grasping and finger movements.

Early reaching and grasping

From the very first week active infants reach for interesting objects that are within their reach.

By 4 months infants are becoming quite good at bringing their hands to a toy and sometimes they succeed at grabbing it as well. Th difficult part of grasping is shaping and positioning the hand for easy grasp.

Inspecting toys - sitting in a feeding chair

As soon as infants are able to sit independently and securely and do not need the hands for balance, they start to use the two hands together to manipulate, shake, bang, throw, drop, and explore small objects and toys.

Attention is the magic ingredient for learning hand tasks

And motivation is also essential

Delayed development of of hand function is often associated with low motivation and poor attention abilities, along with a tendency to avoid tasks that unfamiliar and appear to be difficult. Learn how to structure the environment to enhance motivation and attention for better learning.

Shaking games

Infants from the age of 5-6 months take great pleasure in shaking toys that make a noise.

Shaking toys gives the infant lots of practice doing rhythmical repeated actions. This seems to connected in some way to the emergence of repeated sound babbling such as ba ba ba or ma ma ma.

Drumming and banging

As soon as they are able to sit independently infants will start to move their arms up and down rhythmically. They soon discover that they can use this favorite action to make a very satisfactory noise by banging their hands on different surfaces such a tins, boxes and tables.

Messy play for fussy fingers

Some toddlers and young children have a very strong dislike of touching soft and squishy substances and really dislike getting their hands dirty.

This dislike or even fear of "dirt" is probably linked to having an overactive disgust emotion. Disgust is a very primitive and visceral emotion, the core function being to protect the individual toxins and pathogens.

Picking up and and moving large objects

Infants learn a lot about how to adapt their movements when they are given the opportunity to pick up and move large objects.

Posting games

From about 12 months infants start to enjoy posting things into holes. In fact you will find that as they get older they cannot resist an opportunity to post everyday objects and toys into any available slot or hole. So if you have lost your keys start looking for possible key-posting slots.

Ball games provide many opportunities for infant learning

Ball games with a partner promote many infant abilities: throwing and catching a ball, careful visual attention, taking turns, sharing pleasure.

Infants using the hands to get thing done