Eye-Hand Coordination Activity

This eye hand coordination activity is an easy one to set up and can use the materials you have in your home. We used a flower ice cube tray and some craft materials, as well as a recycled scoop to work on eye-hand coordination skills, but the motor activity is very open ended. Let’s discuss hand eye coordination and a few ways to work on this skill area.

Development of hand-eye coordination is an important place to begin.

Our movements are guided by vision.  In order for our brains to coordinate a motor plan for a particular task, we need visual input for accuracy.  

Eye Hand Coordination Activity 

Visual motor skills or eye-hand coordination impacts our dexterity and motor movements for so many tasks:  handwriting, scissor use, threading beads, reading a paragraph, throwing a ball, placing a cup on a shelf, coloring in lines, and pouring milk into a bowl are just a few skills that require coordination of the vision and hands.    

If eye hand coordination skills are lacking, then these areas of function will be difficult to do with ease.  Learning, social interactions, and independence in tasks can be limited as a result.  That’s a pretty clear a reason to look at eye-hand coordination when there seem to be “bigger picture” problems. 

 

Scooping and Pouring and eye hand coordination

This scooping activity is a simple way to work on the eye-hand coordination needed for coordinated movements of the hands in relation to visual input.  An activity as simple as scooping beads can help children (and adults addressing physical disabilities!) to improve their visual motor integration.  

This post contains affiliate links.   We used  a HUGE bin of seed beads and a flower ice cube tray. This is a similar tray. It was a tray of 10 flowers, making it perfect for counting to ten with my toddler and preschooler and working on ten frame math facts with my kindergartner.    

I added a couple of small scoops to our beads.  These scoops came from dry laundry detergent and were the perfect size for scooping the beads into each flower.  

Scooping and pouring the beads into each flower, one at a time works on eye hand coordination to make sure the beads fall into the flowers and not over the edge of the ice cube tray.  

How to improve eye hand coordination

Scooping and pouring a material that “pours” is an eye hand coordination activity that helps to refine fine motor skills and motor planning. For children, setting up a scooping activity like the one described here can be graded to make the task more difficult, or easier. Different grades of scooping activities can be more difficult because there is less weight (pouring flour compared to sand) or more mobility ( scooping and pouring liquid compared higher viscosity of the materials.)

In our scooping and pouring eye hand coordination activity, the beads are smaller and rounder, adding more of a challenge in coordinating the scoop and accuracy of pouring. To further grade this activity, different sizes of scoops can be used, and different sizes of containers to pour the material into.

Make sure your child is scooping beads into one section of the ice tray at a time.  They need to intentionally fill one section while trying to keep the beads in that section.  If the beads are falling over the edge of the ice cube tray and into other sections, it’s not working on eye-hand coordination.   

More eye hand coordination activities

Looking for more creative ways to build eye hand coordination?

• Try using cardboard and tweezers.  
• Bilateral Coordination Visual Motor Integration Clover
• Jumbo Fine Motor Threading Activity
• Blue-Themed Sensory Play for Babies and Toddlers
• Fine Motor Play with Tissue Paper
• Baby Brain Building

Spring Fine Motor Kit

Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!

Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:

• Lacing cards
• Sensory bin cards
• Hole punch activities
• Pencil control worksheets
• Play dough mats
• Write the Room cards
• Modified paper
• Sticker activities
• MUCH MORE

Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.

Grab your copy of the Spring Fine Motor Kit and build coordination, strength, and endurance in fun and creative activities. Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.

Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.