As humans, we have five senses: smell, touch, vision, hearing, and taste. To utilize these senses properly in our day-to-day activities with proper coordination, we need motor skills to manage sensory stimulation. Sensory and motor skills are two sides of the same coin, which go hand in hand to develop a child’s growth during their learning age.
Sensory motor skills are the pillars for all learning throughout life. Through these skills, children develop their cognitive thinking and understanding levels. They interact with their world through playing, crawling, walking, learning balancing, completing given tasks, problem-solving, and coordinating their activities visually. For this, children need proper guidance from their parents and teachers during the learning stage. Therefore, sensory motor skill education becomes important for early childhood. Children learn new things through their senses of touch, vision, hearing, taste, and smell. Motor skills help sensory organs to coordinate the body’s parts. Muscle strength, gross, and fine motor skills play important roles in motor skill development. If any sensory organ doesn’t work properly in children, they can struggle to continue learning at the same speed as other children of the same age. So, motor skill development is a crucial aspect of children’s early learning stages.
Motor skills establish cognitive development. They help children complete their daily physical activities, setting up all sensory organs to collaborate. It improves attention span and application levels by doing activities like tying shoe laces, wearing socks easily, holding pencils properly, lifting things properly, and building attentiveness. Locomotor skills include activities like walking, running, hopping, sliding, skipping, leaping, etc., which help improve physical fitness in students.
Motor skills enhance the all-round development of children. Motor skills are essentially learning by doing. For example, children try to make different shapes from clay, utilizing their imagination power. They can also develop abilities to use their physical strength by performing small activities like peeling fruits or folding handkerchiefs. These activities help improve children’s eye-to-hand coordination and build confidence in them. We can say that motor skills develop all five sensory organs’ efficiency, which is helpful for any perception. Children can easily complete tasks after some repeated practice, which trains their body parts and brains to organize things in a particular manner.
So, sensory and motor skills interact with each other in the development of children.
