What are fine motor skills? What do they have to do with cooking?

Fine motor skills are skills that use the smaller muscles of the hands, fingers, and wrist. Many of these skills are what allow us to complete a number of functional tasks such as buttoning our clothes, writing, cutting with scissors, and in this case…cooking! Many of the different tasks required for successful cooking require some level of fine motor skills including opening food packages, measuring ingredients, pouring ingredients into a bowl, mixing ingredients together, cutting food with a fork and knife, and many more.

What are the different fine motor skills? (listed in alphabetical order)

Bimanual Coordination: Ability to use both hands together to complete an activity such as buttoning a shirt, cutting food with a fork and knife, and stringing beads.

Grasp Patterns:

• Cylindrical Grasp: Holding items with entire hand in contact with item and thumb opposed (see below for definition). Used on various cooking items such as spatula and mixing spoons.
• Lateral Pinch: Made with pad of thumb and side of index finger. Primarily used for activities such as turning a key and opening food containers such as fruit cups.
• Pincer Grasp: Made with pad of thumb and pad of index finger. Primarily used to pick up small items.
• Radial Grasp: Holding items with thumb and index finger but object is stabilized with rest of hand.
• Three Point Pinch: Made with pad of thumb with pads of index and middle fingers

Hand Eye Coordination: Ability to combine visual information with hand movements. Examples include throwing and catching a ball, placing an item on a target

Hand Strength: While not a true fine motor skill, the strength of each of your toddler’s individual and overall hand, finger, and wrist muscles will have an impact on their fine motor skills.

In-Hand Manipulation Skills:

• Translation: Using the fingers to move small item(s) from finger tips to palm and from palm to finger tips. This skill is required to pick up multiple small items from the table (finger to palm) and moving a coin from palm to fingers to place into a piggy bank or vending machine (palm to finger).
• Shift: Moving an object up or down using the pads of the fingers such as shifting grip on a pencil or jacket zipper.
• Rotation: Using fingertips to roll an object such as flipping a pencil to use the eraser.

Separation of Sides of Hand: Ability of the two sides of the hand to work separately and together. The thumb, index and middle fingers complete more precision based activities such as grasping small items. The ring and pinky fingers provide additional strength and stability to larger grasp movements. Separation of the sides of the hand also allows for holding small items in the hand while picking up additional items.

Thumb Opposition: Rotation of the thumb out/away from the palm which allows for pad of thumb to reach pads of all the other fingers – creates a “C”

Tool Use: Ability to use and manipulate tools such as cooking utensils and writing tools (pens, pencils, markers, etc). Requires a variety of grasp patterns depending upon type of tool and age of toddler/stage of development.