AD – this is a sponsored collaboration.
Hand-eye coordination is the process of your brain making signals to your hands – it helps you pick things up, hold things, and use items with your hands. Most of the time this skill is shown when playing sports like tennis, basketball and netball.
It starts from very early in our lives when playing with toys and beginning to walk after crawling. Our hands are very useful tools after all! I’ve teamed up with this private nursery in Islington to show how you can help your child with their hand-eye coordination.
To practice their hand-eye coordination, you can incorporate some of these methods into their day:
- Playing catch
Throwing a ball back and forth gives your child practice with their memory and also practice in using their hands and arms to catch a ball. - Arts and worksheet games
Painting, writing and playing games like connect the dots, word searches and colouring books give them the chance to use their hands and fingers. - Bowling with skittles
You can recreate this at home with a decently-sized football and some plastic skittles. This gives them the chance to see how momentum works with their arms and hands. - Playing board games
Games that allow your child to pick things up like cards and chips, like in Monopoly or Cluedo for instance, gives them the chance to practice critical thinking alongside hand-eye coordination. - Juggling
A game that really tests your brain and your hands is juggling. It requires a lot of coordination to ensure children grab the balls they’re throwing at the right time.
As they grow, children will be better skilled in using their hands and thoughts to perform the right actions in both games and in their daily lives too. These kinds of activities are designed to strengthen a lot of childrens’ muscles as well as boosting their coordination skills.
