Just in time for Black Friday and holiday shopping, we asked our OTs for a list of their top 10 favorite fine motor toys to promote hand strength, develop age-appropriate pencil grasp, work on coordination, and more!

Here’s what they recommended

Pop tubes
These fun tubes are great for auditory and tactile stimulation. You can pull, push, and stack
them, each time making a fun crinkle sound. It also helps promote bilateral coordination and
grip strength.

Squigz
Flexible, “fun little suckers” of different shapes and colors with suctions on each side that stick
to each other and to any solid, nonporous surface, which lends itself to endless creativity.
Benefits include developing grip strength, fine motor coordination, and visual motor
integration.

Hand Putty
Pull, squeeze, tear, and cut! This firm putty helps develop your little one’s hand strength for writing, coloring and cutting! Kids love hiding objects in this putty and finding them with their pincer grasps!

Color Bug Catcher by Learning Resources
Develops fine motor skills by rolling dice and using tweezers to catch, sort, and play with
colorful bugs. It also promotes color recognition and counting.

Mosaic Peg Board by Amosting
Develops fine motor skills while placing small, colorful pegs onto different backgrounds to
create pictures.

Spike the Fine Motor Hedgehog by Learning Resources
Develops fine motor skills by adding and removing peg-shaped, colorful quills. It also promotes
bilateral coordination, color recognition, sorting, and counting skills.

Playdough Crazy Cuts Set
This fun playdough sets comes with various tools such as scissors and a hand crank, which
develop fine motor skills and bilateral coordination. Using hand strength to squeeze the
playdough and turn the crank on the barbershop chair, you can create fun hairstyles and hats!

Visual Motor Game (Shape puzzle)
Recreate cute little animals with a variety of shapes with this awesome activity to improve your child’s visual motor skills, which can help with letter formation (handwriting), scissor skills, and so much more!

Peg board and stringing bead set
Toddlers can learn bilateral coordination (using both hands together) with this great peg board that includes string to learn to string beads.  Comes with dice as well to make a game, sorting activity, learning colors, patterns, etc!

Nuts and Bolts Set
Toddlers and little ones can use these nuts and bolts to improve color matching skills, bilateral coordination, shape recognition, fine motor skills and hand strength!

Want more therapist-approved toys?!

Check out our resources tab for an all-ages list with tons of great developmental toys for your little ones!