USING PAPER IN KINDERGARTEN TO DEVELOP AND ESTIMATE LEVELS OF FINE MOTOR SKILLS

Currently, we have faced problems in the area of developing fine motor skills for pre-school and school children. As there has been a huge expansion of touch electronics, such as tablets in households as well as at schools, the necessity to use more fingers of a hand is decreasing. Therefore, the development of children's fine motor skills is on the downgrade. Our research plan deals with the development and testing fine motor skills in pre-school children. Usually, there are standardized sets used to test fine motor skills. The sets include a variety of testing tools, e.g. "Purdue Pegboard"- a commonly used standardized test of fine motor skills of upper limb. We consider the main disadvantage of the tools the fact that the tool is only for testing and younger children may find it uninteresting. The tool we designed in pilot testing develops and tests fine motor skills and, after its evaluation and subsequent finalization, children may take away the resulting product. In that way, children are more motivated to increase their performance and activity participation. In this part, we use paper as the main material to create a product and other materials, most commonly paper. Paper or wool is suitable for the products practising stringing, when fine motor skills are developed. If there is a model for a solution set up, then the competence of problems solving is also partially developed. For now, the output is a set of two testing products (from paper) and a smaller pilot testing specimen of 80 children at the age of 5-6 years. The testing proved its suitability of use and differences in results even in such a small age range, however, the products will be adapted and then applied on a bigger specimen to increase the reliability.