Practicing fine motor skills is an essential part of education. Regardless of language skills, your students need to practice fine motor skills to succeed in other areas.
Many of those learning tasks require that students master how to hold writing tools, scissors, and be self-sufficient. Creating bilingual activities for ELL or dual-language learners is also crucial for self-advocacy.
While practicing fine motor skills, bilingual learners will also be able to use manipulatives during math lessons.
How can you create fine motor skills activities for your bilingual learners?
Practicing Fine Motor Skills
Bilingual learners need to practice a variety of skills. Of course, language skill is an essential aspect of learning.
Besides developing language acquisition, they also need to practice fine motor skills.
While these skills may be easy, they represent a big part of developing other skills. Holding a pencil is just as crucial as flipping pages through a book to read.
These skills need time to flourish. So, create different fun ways that bilingual learners practice fine motor skills.
Bilingual Number Tracing
One of the most specific fine motor skills to practice is number tracing. Whether you use a digital or paper print-out, this activity is an excellent way to encourage students to write.
For bilingual learners, practicing fine motor skills with numbers also provides other opportunities. Besides using finger muscles to trace numbers, they also encounter vocabulary and number sense.
Many printables enhance one set of skills. That is, seek other ways that you can combine fine motor skills with math learning.
In that way, your bilingual learners also get to practice number identification, counting, and tracing.
Practicing Tracing and Cutting
Holding a pencil or scissors is just as important as identifying letters and numbers.
- For instance, young bilingual learners might get to practice fine motor skills at home.
- Perhaps, they practice how to use zippers in a jacket, buttons on a shirt, or tie shoelaces.
- However, in school, preschoolers would need to enhance those learned skills.
- One way to nourish those fine motor skills is to practice tracing different lines and cutting.
- For example, you might use various writing tools like crayons, paint, or markers to trace other types of lines.
- The more variety you integrate into learning those skills, the more practice your students get.
- You could use various paper materials and ask your students to cut pieces of paper.
- Then, you might make them into a collage or picture.
- Also, you can create a cutting workbook.
- In this case, you can add different activities to practice cutting.
Either practice helps preschoolers master those skills vital to learning.
Fun Dot to Dot Bilingual Activities
Perhaps, your students prefer hands-on activities that use paint. Well, finger painting in any form is also a fantastic way to use fine motor skills.
For instance, you could use the practice of finding an object by following a pattern. Then, use paint to track the pattern.
In finding the item, your students learn bilingual terms too. The fun part is that you could let your students use their little fingers or use other tools.
Another way to use a dot-to-dot fine motor skill practice is to paint in shapes. In a holiday theme printable, your students practice fine motor skills when they dot paint a circle pattern.
In either method, your students develop bilingual and fine motor skills.
Practicing fine motor skills establishes a learning experience that supports other areas. Number tracing and cutting are some fun ways to develop those skills.
While hands-on activities are ideal ways to practice fine motor skills, use additional resources too. Finger painting and dot to dot marking are also fun ideas to motivate bilingual learners to practice fine motor skills.
BMascarenowriter | Math4Bilinguals 