There was no association between the overall quality of day care center measured using ITERS-R and fine motor development of children. The small number of children attending good quality day care may have contributed to these results, as 76% of the children attending good quality day care had above average performance, while that percentage was 58.8% in the population attending poor quality daycare. Authors who identify the school environment as a risk factor for child development reported routines with predominance of activities dedicated to nutrition and hygiene.2 , 8 , 19 , 21 However, when considering the quality items of classrooms using the ITERS-R, only the item oral language and understanding were related to fine motor performance. This item assesses the opportunity for children to express themselves in the classroom, how teachers foster children communication and how they strive to be understood. Appropriate language stimulation enables the interaction of children in the school environment, favors their stimulation and creates links between them, the teacher, and classmates, which promotes child development in general13 , 28 and appears to be linked to fine motor performance of the assessed children. Another aspect related to language is the influence of the ability of children to communicate and understand tasks during the fine motor performance assessments according to Bayley, as during the assessment they needed to understand the commands of investigators and repeat the proposed activities. Children who could better understand the proposed task could do it more easily, while others may have failed to do the activities for failing to understand what was proposed. According to the Embodiment cognition theory,35 children build the representation of objects through their physical interaction with them and, in this process, multiple factors interact, including brain and body, context and prior learning. Thus, it is believed that children in day care centers who received better language stimulation performed better in the evaluation because they understand and know better the proposed tasks.