Skill shelf · thumb and two fingertips · 9 activities
Pincer Grip and Small Precision
The shelf where the target is small: a chickpea, a button hole, a slot that only takes the disc one way round.
A pincer grip is the thumb meeting the tip of one or two fingers with the rest of the hand kept out of the way. It is the grip for a bead, a chickpea, a bean going into an egg cup. The test for this shelf is simple: is the thing being picked up small enough that the palm cannot help? A sponge is not. A dried chickpea, at about eight millimetres and round, very much is.
Every activity here has three dials, and they are all yours. How fine the fingers or the tool have to be, how small the thing is, and how tight the hole it has to land in. Tweezers, chickpeas and an egg carton is the tongs and cotton wool activity from age two, moved up on all three at once. Move one dial down and a stuck child is unstuck, which is the whole of too easy, too hard, or just right.
Next door, grip and hand strength is the same hand doing the opposite job, and using tools with control is what happens when something is put between the fingers and the work. Several activities appear on more than one of the three, because a pair of tweezers asks for a pinch and a steer in the same movement.
The nine
Ordered by the age they suit best, from two to seven. Each line gives the setup, the play time and whether anything has to be bought.
- Cardboard Slotting and Coin Drop Your child turns a disc until it lines up with the slot, posts it, and listens for it landing. 15 min, once · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Clothespin Pinching Your child squeezes a wooden clothes peg open and clips it onto the rim of a bowl, and then does it forty more times. no setup · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Kitchen Tongs and Ice Tray Transfer Your child picks up a cotton wool ball with kitchen tongs, carries it across the table and drops it into an ice cube tray, twelve cups in a row. no setup · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Peg and Hole Matching Your child picks up a fat peg, lines it up over a hole that just fits it, and pushes it home. none once made · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Posting and Slotting Your child pushes a plastic lid through a slot cut in a tub, hears it land, and then takes the tub lid off and finds it again. 2 min · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Tweezer Transfer Challenge Your child lifts dried chickpeas one at a time with a pair of tweezers and puts each one into its own small well. 2 min · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Button Sewing Card Your child sews real buttons onto a punched card with a shoelace, up through one hole and down through the other, until the card is covered in buttons. 15 min, once · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Egg Carton Counting Grid Your child reads the number written in the bottom of an egg carton cup and drops in exactly that many beans, one at a time, twelve cups in a row. 15 min, once · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Soap Carving and Safe Whittling Your child cuts a shape out of a bar of soap with a blunt tool, slowly, and the shavings go everywhere. 5 min · 20 to 40 min · household only
All nine run on what is already in the kitchen or the button jar. Where a size matters, and it usually does, the number is on the activity's own page.