Picture books & exploring hand-sized toys

What you need

• A comfortable place to sit with your baby or toddler on your lap or beside you. This space could be indoors or outdoors.
• Picture books with large, colourful images.
• Favourite hand-sized toys of your child (e.g. small figures, toy cars).

Benefits

This activity helps your child to develop fine motor control in their hands, as well as hand-eye coordination.

The experience

Sit with your baby and read their favourite picture books. Point at the pictures and discuss the images. Ask your child to turn the pages. Don’t worry if your child decides to turn through all of the pages quickly before you have read them.

A little variation to this: sit with your child and pass their favourite hand-sized toys back and forth. Discuss each toy. Encouraging your child to pick up small objects is a great way to develop their fine motor skills. This will start with them picking up using a whole hand grasp, and develop to picking up using their thumb and fingers.