If there is one thing I can thank Allah for keeping me as a teacher until this very day, that would be for the opportunity to teach Danial. Why? These four ways to trigger your kid’s motor skills were purely what I did with Danial this entire year but I knew little about them until my recent reading on a pedagogy I wished to study more. Alhamdulillah. All praise be to Allah for giving me ways to learn new things. These are the four ways I learned and did with Danial:

• Peeling off egg shell from boiled egg

One day, a colleague of mine gave me a boiled egg and instead of having it whole to myself, I offered my class to share with me. I remembered Danial loves to eat boiled egg so I asked that friend to give me one more egg so I could give to Danial.

Right after school, I handed it to Danial and recorded a short video for his mother to see what kept Danial upstairs in the class with me. That was when I learned from his mother that peeling off shell from the boiled egg is actually good for a child’s motor skills. Alhamdulillah, a discovery was made.

Click here to watch the video on WOUII YouTube.

• Sticking sparkles on checkered surface

This is quite recent and I gathered this lesson through my personal observation. During Art & Craft Examination, students were given a few questions to choose from and Danial had chosen a question entitled “Gift Box”. Part of decorating the box, Danial was prepared with a piece of sparkling diamond-like sticker sheet which then I observed he stuck them onto checkered surface.

I saw it was quite brief for him once he got it but during the initial part, it was those stickers who were separated from its sticky bottoms that made Danial stumbled and from far I saw him wondering why some of his stickers did not work they way they should. Once he got it, I saw that lining those diamond-like stickers in many files and within his own imaginary squares were a great task that by the end of it, I knew he was satisfied of being able to accomplish it. It was equally satisfying for me to see from far. You may want to consider this second way to trigger your kid’s motor skills because there are so many things you can learn about your kid’s concentration from just observing them completing this activity.

• Painting with water colours

I vividly remember that this activity that we did on a piece of cloth was not only fun for children with special needs, but also for other kids in the class. Not only it was done outdoor (I hate being too long in the class), but it was such a great experiment they were about to do to their old white t-shirts. But first of all, they were assigned to collect pebbles of different sizes before they wrapped the pebbles with their t-shirts and rubber bands and dipped the wrapped pebbles into water colours. The result was colourful and most importantly, we laughed a lot looking at the results.

• Pebbles sorting

It is great. Of four ways to trigger your kid’s motor skills, this one was the most mind-boggling.It was adventurous for the kids to find pebbles with a limited space given (in my case it was just a yard) according to the specifications we had assigned them with. After some time, I was amused enough to see how they tried to bend the given specifications when they could not meet them. And that is typical for a kid when it comes to negotiating terms.

I hope with this amusing sharing, it will help you to put down your gadgets and explore the world around you. With these activities, not only your kid’s motor skills are improved, in fact, they create bonding between you and your child. What are you waiting for, let’s get our hands into something today!