A motor skill is a skill that requires an organism to utilize their skeletal muscles effectively in a goal directed manner. Motor skills and motor control depend upon the proper functioning of the brain, skeleton, joints, and nervous system. Most motor skills are learned throughout the lifespan and can be affected by disabilities. Motor development is the development of action and coordination of one's limbs, as well as the development of strength, posture control, balance, and perceptual skills. A skill is an ability, usually learned and acquired through training, to perform actions which achieve a desired outcome. ... A top-down view of skeletal muscle Skeletal muscle is a type of striated muscle, usually attached to the skeleton. ... The human brain In animals, the brain (enkephalos) (Greek for in the skull), is the control center of the central nervous system, responsible for behavior. ... For other uses, see Skeleton (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Joint (disambiguation). ... The Human Nervous System. ... Human position refers to a position of a human body. ... In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. ...

Motor skills are into two parts:

• Gross motor skills include lifting one's head, rolling over, sitting up, balancing, crawling, and walking. Gross motor development usually follows a pattern. Generally large muscles develop before smaller ones. Thus, gross motor development is the foundation for developing skills in other areas (such as fine motor skills). Development also generally moves from top to bottom. The first thing a baby usually learns is to control is it eyes.
• Fine motor skills include the ability to manipulate small objects, transfer objects from hand to hand, and various hand-eye coordination tasks. Fine motor skills may involve the use of very precise motor movement in order to achieve an especially delicate task. Some examples of fine motor skills are using the pincer grasp (thumb and forefinger) to pick up small objects, cutting, coloring and writing, and threading beads. Fine motor development refers to the development of skills involving the smaller muscle groups.

Fine Motor Disabilities negatively impact a child's performance in school but have no bearing on their intellectual ability. It strictly speaks to an individual’s struggle to control the small muscles in their hand as they write. Since communication in the form of writing is important and still heavily relied upon in our society and schools, kids with this disability face a variety of obstacles. Simply writing their name is not only time consuming, it may also end up illegible. To make their work legible, these individuals must exert a great deal of focus and energy which leaves very little left over for concentrating on what they are writing about. The term gross motor skills refers to the abilities usually acquired through infancy to early childhood as part of the childs motor development. ... Fine motor skills can be defined as small muscle movements which occur in the fingers, in coordination with the eyes. ... Gross motor coordination addresses the gross motor skills: walking, running, climbing, jumping, crawling, lifting ones head, sitting up, etc. ... In Wikipedia, precision has the following meanings: In engineering, science, industry and statistics, precision characterises the degree of mutual agreement among a series of individual measurements, values, or results - see accuracy and precision. ...

Disabilities affecting motor skills

• ADC
• Alzheimer's disease
• Catatonia
• Cerebral palsy
• Developmental Dyspraxia
• Hypotonia
• Multiple sclerosis
• Parkinson's Disease
• Syphilis
• Lou Gehrig Disease

AIDS dementia complex (ADC; also known as HIV dementia, HIV encephalopathy and HIV-associated dementia) has become a common neurological disorder associated with HIV infection and AIDS. It is is a metabolic encephalopathy induced by HIV infection and fueled by immune activation of brain macrophages and microglia. ... This is a page about catatonic state. ... Cerebral palsy (CP) is an umbrella term encompassing a group of non-progressive,[1] non-contagious diseases that cause physical disability in human development. ... Developmental Dyspraxia is one or all of a heterogeneous range of psychological development disorders affecting the initiation, organization and performance of action[1]. It entails the partial loss of the ability to coordinate and perform certain purposeful movements and gestures in the absence of motor or sensory impairments. ... Hypotonia is a condition of abnormally low muscle tone (the amount of tension or resistance to movement in a muscle), often involving reduced muscle strength. ... Syphilis is a curable sexually transmitted disease caused by the Treponema pallidum spirochete. ... Motor neurone disease (MND) is a term used to cover a number of illnesses of the motor neurone: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), progressive muscular atrophy (PMA), progressive bulbar palsy (PBP) and progressive lateral sclerosis (PLS). ...

See also

• Biomechanics
• Chunking (psychology)
• Dexterity
• Motor learning
• Movement disorders
• right-handed
• left-handed
• ambidexterity

• Section about motor learning and control in the Wikibook "Stuttering"

Biomechanics is the research and analysis of the mechanics of living organisms or the application and derivation of engineering principles to and from biological systems. ... In cognitive psychology and mnemonics, chunking refers to a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information. ... A little dexterity is helpful in working with knitting needles Look up dexterity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Motor learning is the process of improving the smoothness and accuracy of movements. ... List of Movement disorders Akinesia (lack of movement) Athetosis (contorted torsion or twisting) Ataxia Ballismus (violent involuntary rapid and irregular movements) Hemiballismus Bradykinesia (slow movement) Chorea (rapid, involuntary movement) Sydenhams chorea Rheumatic chorea Huntingtons chorea Dystonia (sustained torsion) Dystonia muscularum Blepharospasm Writers cramp Spasmodic torticollis (twisting of... A person who is right-handed is more dextrous with their right hand than with their left hand: they will write with their right hand, and probably also use this hand for tasks such as personal care, cooking, and so on. ... People who are left-handed are more dextrous with their left hand than with their right hand: they will probably also use their left hand for tasks such as personal care, cooking, and so on. ... Ambidexterity is the ability of being equally adept with each hand (or, to a limited degree, feet). ...

External Links

• Information on Fine Motor Disabilities in Children from The Learning Center Foundation