How craft activities help young children train their muscles for writing
Simple paper cutting and colouring in serve to help develop a child’s motor skills and prepare them for more complex tasks, such as correctly holding a pen for writing
My son’s Year One teacher lets them do a lot of colouring and paper crafts with staplers. I thought this was preschool work. He seems to enjoy it but it is not really proper education, is it?
In early primary a lot of the more “academic” skills you might hope to see are still a little ahead of many student’s abilities. Instead children are often asked to tear up strips of paper, scrunch, staple or stuff them into a shape, colour, choose items for a task, follow instructions and describe to another child what to do.
The teacher will need to gauge how ready her class is for a lot of writing. Pushing a small child to write a full page of text is exhausting and counterproductive if they have yet to develop the fine motor control to hold a pencil correctly.
Looking at a child’s gross (big muscle groups) and fine motor skills will help the teacher decide on how to divide classroom time between muscle development and actual writing. Tearing up strips of paper uses the shoulder and core muscles as they twist and pull. These are part of the writing muscles, too, bending over paper and moving hands across it. They also support a child’s ability to lift shapes and focus on their properties or place cubes to develop maths skills.
Further down the arm are the bigger hand muscles used in scrunching, stapling and stuffing.For small children it can be tiring after an hour or less. Combining activities such as tearing, scrunching and stuffing gives a child the chance to rest one set of muscles while they use the other.
The opposable thumb is something humans have over other animals but it uses a muscle we need to strengthen. Teachers are very aware of the impact a lack of strength and coordination will have on students’ ability to fully engage in and learn from other activities.