10 Games To Improve Psychometric Abilities In Children

Psychometric abilities are a set of skills that we are continuously developing and improving from birth. They imply the use of other necessary skills in order for the proper development of both gross motor skills (learning to walk, sitting without falling over…) and fine motor skills (grabbing an object, coloring inside the lines…), sensory (responding to sounds), affective-emotional (imitating), and cognitive, and language development (properly pronouncing words). There are many pathologies that present with a psychomotor delay, which translates into motor, cognitive, and affective difficulties. For example, children with developmental disorders like autism, mental retardation, or brain damage, as well as dyslexia, ADHD, or cancer may have problems with psychomotor development. Luckily, there are many brain games and exercises that can help improve psychometric abilities in children, which will be helpful both if your child has difficulties and if they don’t.

What aspects of psychometrics will you train with these games?

• Coordination
• Fine motor-skills
• Hand-eye coordination
• Visual-spatial integration

10 games to improve psychometric abilities in children

• Play with clay. Squeezing, stretching, and pulling the clay will help develop the muscles that are used in fine motor-skills. Making shapes and figures uses creativity. Suggest creating different figures, you can go by categories: animals, food, things found in nature…or you can let your kid surprise you! You can also put things in the clay, like buttons, straws, beans, etc. and then take them out.
• Do mazes. Start with more simple ones and work up to more difficult ones. If you want to do a simple maze and make it harder, ask them to complete it in their head before drawing it.

• Play Tanagrams. Recreating figures with a Tanagram is a good way to improve psychometrics and visual-spatial perception.
• Play with geometric shapes. Recognizing geometric shapes like stencils so that the child can draw.
• Cut. Use some safety scissors to cut out shapes. Start with simple shapes and play with them when you’re done!
• Puzzles. Doing puzzles doesn’t only improve our motor abilities, but it also helps improve our executive functions. Play with simple puzzles that are appropriate for your child, and get harder and harder as your child’s abilities improve.
• Play dress-up. This is fun and your child will have a blast! Putting on and take off different clothes with different kinds of buttons (big, small, oval…), Velcro, and zippers will help develop fine motor skills.
• Shoot hoops. Grab a waste-basket and shoot some hoops with your child. Use different heights (sitting on the sofa, standing, standing on a chair…), different distances, and balls with different weights (paper balls, big rubber band balls, small hand-ball balls…)
• Hole punch. Make holes in a figure, and sew them up to make them pretty.
• Make bracelets. Besides being fashionable, they’ll be a great gift for moms, aunts, grandmas… Use buttons and beads, and string.