We stimulate graphical-motor skills

The steps of pregraphism

Around the age of two and a half, children try to imitate the writing of adults, drawing mostly horizontal lines, then more wavy. At the age of three they try instead to close symbols and figures that before they left open. At the age of four, children can draw some letters of the alphabet. Around the age of five, they can associate the symbol with the sound and write the letters of the alphabet by heart, that is, without copying them. Not all children follow this pattern; they should be left free to express themselves as they wish. They often use drawings and colors to express themselves creatively and freely!

How do we stimulate graphomotor skills?

Daily activities

Let's train in the use of our hands and their integration with the visual system. We can stimulate autonomy from an early age in dressing, undressing and tying their shoelaces, or all those situations of manipulation in free experimentation such as preparing the dough for cookies or cake, the manipulation of water, paper, leaves, foam, earth, etc..

Games

With very young children you can use soft, colorful and richly projecting toys so that they can be grasped with different adaptations of hand position. As they grow, you can propose interlocking games, puzzles, musical instruments that require the integration of the fingers to be played, but also hand-eye coordination games such as creating their own necklaces by threading and lacing, mazes and paths to be traced on different surfaces.

Rotation exercises

We assess coordination by proposing exercises of ROTATION of the various districts, starting with large movements until you get to more precise movements, perhaps accompanied by some music. Rotate the arm around the shoulder, the forearm around the elbow and finally the hand around the wrist and ask your child to imitate you.

Tension Awareness

We then move on to TENSION AWARENESS exercises by asking the child to hold his or her hands or arms stiff and then loose. You can pretend to be a robot with loose upper limb screws and walk around the room dangling your arms. You can modify the full sack and empty sack game by asking your child to hold their arms straight up in the air and then collapse them down.

Drawing lines

Use finger paints and glide in various directions with curved or broken lines. Then have fun trying to figure out what the doodle you created looks like. Then you can come up with ideas for planning the traces: mountains (broken lines) hills and sea waves (curved lines) snails, little clouds.

Drawing Footprints

Fill in the sheet with handprints on a large sheet, fingerprints and stamps for smaller sheets. It is important in this exercise to ask the child not to overlap the fingerprints, so he/she should first fill in a free space and then look for space between the fingerprints already made. To make the exercise more complex, you can draw circles on the paper the size of your finger and ask the child to fill in the space with his fingertip smeared with color.

Draw caterpillars

With your finger smeared with color, draw many balls close together to create a caterpillar and ask your child to draw the caterpillar's babies in the same way.

Chase the thief

Dip your finger into the color and stand on the starting line. Begin to draw a wiggly line inviting your child to do the same by mirroring in the movement you perform.

with sounds

Produce sounds at the same time as the drawings. Short strokes will be paired with short sounds __ (pio) __ (pio) ____ ( cock-a-doodle-doo).

We create and we destroy

you can use paper not only for writing!!! Ask your child to cut out shapes freely or by marking outlines. Tear the paper to create small confetti  Quickly move thumb and forefinger to form small paper balls Cut out body parts from newspapers and create monsters with lots of eyes and arms.

Sand or flour

Fill a baking sheet with flour and use your finger or a stick to create lines and patterns.

Beads and pearls

Build a necklace to improve pincer grip and eye-hand coordination.

How do we stimulate graphomotor skills?

Daily activities

Let's train in the use of our hands and their integration with the visual system. We can stimulate autonomy from an early age in dressing, undressing and tying their shoelaces, or all those situations of manipulation in free experimentation such as preparing the dough for cookies or cake, the manipulation of water, paper, leaves, foam, earth, etc..

Games

With very young children you can use soft, colorful and richly projecting toys so that they can be grasped with different adaptations of hand position. As they grow, you can propose interlocking games, puzzles, musical instruments that require the integration of the fingers to be played, but also hand-eye coordination games such as creating their own necklaces by threading and lacing, mazes and paths to be traced on different surfaces.

Rotation exercises

We assess coordination by proposing exercises of ROTATION of the various districts, starting with large movements until you get to more precise movements, perhaps accompanied by some music. Rotate the arm around the shoulder, the forearm around the elbow and finally the hand around the wrist and ask your child to imitate you.

Tension Awareness

We then move on to TENSION AWARENESS exercises by asking the child to hold his or her hands or arms stiff and then loose. You can pretend to be a robot with loose upper limb screws and walk around the room dangling your arms. You can modify the full sack and empty sack game by asking your child to hold their arms straight up in the air and then collapse them down.

Drawing lines

Use finger paints and glide in various directions with curved or broken lines. Then have fun trying to figure out what the doodle you created looks like. Then you can come up with ideas for planning the traces: mountains (broken lines) hills and sea waves (curved lines) snails, little clouds.

Drawing Footprints

Fill in the sheet with handprints on a large sheet, fingerprints and stamps for smaller sheets. It is important in this exercise to ask the child not to overlap the fingerprints, so he/she should first fill in a free space and then look for space between the fingerprints already made. To make the exercise more complex, you can draw circles on the paper the size of your finger and ask the child to fill in the space with his fingertip smeared with color.

Draw caterpillars

With your finger smeared with color, draw many balls close together to create a caterpillar and ask your child to draw the caterpillar's babies in the same way.

Chase the thief

Dip your finger into the color and stand on the starting line. Begin to draw a wiggly line inviting your child to do the same by mirroring in the movement you perform.

with sounds

Produce sounds at the same time as the drawings. Short strokes will be paired with short sounds __ (pio) __ (pio) ____ ( cock-a-doodle-doo).

We create and we destroy

you can use paper not only for writing!!! Ask your child to cut out shapes freely or by marking outlines. Tear the paper to create small confetti Quickly move thumb and forefinger to form small paper balls Cut out body parts from newspapers and create monsters with lots of eyes and arms.

Sand or flour

Fill a baking sheet with flour and use your finger or a stick to create lines and patterns.

Beads and pearls

Build a necklace to improve pincer grip and eye-hand coordination.

The mystery box game

You can easily make it using a box where you will make two parallel holes to put your child’s arms through, then position it so that he cannot see the contents with his eyes, so that learning is effective for its purpose. Inside you can put various products, the game is to guess just by feeling what it is.

The game of zippers

on a box you can glue some old hinges of different colors, and invite your child to open and close the one with the color you indicated. Try to glue as many as possible, the more colors and hinges there are, the more difficult and challenging this game becomes, if you want to try it yourself you will realize that it is not a walk in the park to choose the color, open and close trying to always reduce the time to accomplish the given task. I recommend, always without insisting or forcing, but wait for the natural time of the child.

 

Source : http: https://www.marilenacremaschini.it/il-pregrafismo-col-metodo-montessori-dai-3-ai-5-anni/

Creating alphabet letters using the body

Children lie on the floor and can create the letter either on their own or with other classmates.

Division into syllables through motor games

The adult says the name of the child (Michela), puts the circles on the ground, the child has to jump inside the circles, when he is in the circle he claps his hands and says MI, then he claps his hands and says CHE and then he claps his hands and says LA. He associates the movement or the jump with the clapping and the division into syllables (which he knows not on a theoretical level but as sounds).

Knowing the lines

Before knowing the lines at theoretical level and on the exercise book it is important to make them know at motor level, they must run in a straight way to know the straight line (with one leg, jumping, putting the chines at the beginning and at the end), to know the curved line they must reproduce a wave of the sea (they pass under over), zig zag line.

 

The cards

They are used for the child to learn to draw lines, to close open lines, to follow a line. Words are drawn or colored, filled in. In the pregraphics worksheets the exercise itself, which is very important, is hidden under the game and the drawing, which the child usually knows and appreciates at that age.

We recommend the site: http://biancosulnero.blogspot.com/2015/11/pregrafismo-per-la-scuola-dellinfanzia.html

Let's play online 1

A teacher explains a fun activity to stimulate pregraphics.

Let's play online 2

Here is an activity to improve fine motor skills.

Learn with interactive games!

Blackboard: the adult reproduces lines, mountains, waves on the blackboard and the child tries to imitate him.

abilità grafo-motoria

We stimulate graphical-motor skills