What are Motor and Cognitive Skills?

Motor Skills:

Motor skills are functions, which involve precise movements of muscles with the intent to perform a specific act. Or, they are motions carried out when the brain, nervous system and muscles work together.

There are two kinds of motor skills: Fine motor skills and Gross motor skills.

Fine motor skills are small movements such as grabbing something with your thumb and forefinger – that use small muscles of the fingers, toes, wrists, lips and tongue.

Gross motor skills are bigger movements such as running and jumping that use large muscles in the arms, legs, torso and feet.

A movement requires the ability to feel or sense what one’s muscles are doing as they perform the act. And when a child lacks the ability to move in a way he originally intended, motor difficulties occur. This has a negative effect on a child’s performance in school. 

As you know it’s our brain that controls all our physical movements. But a newborn baby’s brain is not mature enough to control his movements. Development starts in his head and then moves down his body. In the beginning, babies can control their mouths, faces, lips and tongues; the rest follows in time.

Touch and manipulation teach a lot. This is where fine motor skills come into play. They, however, develop only through practice: as small muscles repeat motions over and again, those muscles remember the movement and the movements become spontaneous. Learning to play a musical instrument is a fine example to demonstrate this. In the beginning you go about it slowly, looking at your notes, and observing the movements of your hands. But as you practice regularly, you start playing easily. Your hand-movements become spontaneous. It’s as if your muscles have a memory of their own. Well, it is indeed called muscle memory.

Agreed we live in the digital world. But it’s still important to be able to manipulate a pencil or a pen with ease. Your child needs to have strong fine motor skills to hold a pencil correctly and to move it in all the ways to draw letters and shapes with precision.

Whether it is playing a musical instrument or a video game, fine motor skills are always at play. Even getting dressed, manipulating buttons and zippers requires strong fingers. Imagine the pressure those little fingers have to take. And this is precisely the reason to help your children develop strong motor skills.

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Cognitive Skills:

            

 There is a huge difference between cognitive and academic skills. Cognitive skills are the mental tools needed to process and learn what is taught in an academic environment. Your cognitive skills must function well for you to read, think, prioritize, understand, plan, remember and solve problems easily and effectively.

It’s not what you know, but how well you process the information you have received. Cognitive skills are the processors of this incoming information.

To put it in a simple manner, cognitive skills are the learning skills used to:

i)        Attain and retain information,

ii)      Process, analyze, and store facts and feelings

iii)    Create mental pictures, read words, and understand concepts.

Two important processing skills come under cognitive skills: Auditory Processing and Visual Processing.

Auditory Processing: The ability to analyze, blend, and segment sounds. Auditory processing is a crucial underlying skill for reading and spelling success. It is the most important skill needed to learn to read. Weakness in any of the auditory processing skills will greatly hinder academic learning – mainly reading, fluency, and comprehension. Students with auditory processing weakness tend to lose motivation to read.  

       Visual Processing: The ability to perceive, analyze, and think in visual images. This includes visualization, which is the ability to create a picture in your mind when you hear words and concepts. Students that have problems with visual processing may have difficulty following instructions, reading maps, doing word math problems, etc.

Hence it’s highly important for a child to have cognitive skills to fare well in academics.

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