Tag Archives: Fine motor

Obstacle Courses for Motor Planning, Strengthening, and More

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Obstacle Courses

I love obstacle courses for kids, and the best part about them is that most kids love them as well!

So, why do I love obstacle courses? Not only are they a quick, cheap and easy activity get kids moving, but obstacle courses have many developmental benefits as well.

Let me break down some of the benefits associated with participation in completing obstacle courses:

First, obstacle courses provide a great opportunity to engage in and practice praxis and motor planning skills. Praxis is the term that includes the need to create, plan, and carry out a sequence of motor movements.  Obstacle courses often offer novel physical environments for children, challenging their praxis skills. This also provides opportunities for children to reflect and learn how their motor plan and movements succeeded (or didn’t quite succeed) leading to development and improvement of motor planning and praxis skills.

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While completing these motor movements, children are also engaging in weight-bearing and strengthening activities.  It’s fun to incorporate challenges such as climbing over or crawling under obstacles. These motions allow for weight-bearing on the arms which helps to strengthen hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, and core muscles.

It’s beneficial to strengthen all of these muscles as they provide important aspects of postural control as well as allow for precision movements for tasks such as handwriting and many other fine motor tasks. Having strong core and proximal (close to the body) muscles allows children to use their hands more easily for tasks requiring precision.

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Obstacle courses also encourage body awareness and bilateral integration skills (using both sides of the body in an organized and coordinated manner).  While climbing through tunnels, up ladders, or under items, coordination between both right and left arms and legs must be coordinated to successfully complete the challenge.

Opportunities for tactile (touch) and proprioceptive sensory input are also present while completing obstacle courses and together these senses promote body awareness, or knowing where your body is in space. Proprioception allows us to know where our limbs are and how much force our muscles are using at any given moment. Participating in “heavy work” activities that provide substantial input to the proprioceptive system also allows for optimal regulation of arousal levels. Meaning, these activities can both calm or alert children, depending on the situation and needs of the child.

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While moving through obstacle courses, the vestibular sensory system is also activated. This important sensory system provides awareness of where your head is in space and of head movements. The vestibular system works closely with visual and proprioceptive systems to maintain balance.

An additional bonus of obstacle courses is that they can be great for preposition practice. A good obstacle course will have items to go under, over, near, around, next to, etc. It’s a great way to verbally label these actions to help reinforce children’s understanding of these difficult concepts in a fun context.

A Few Obstacle Course Ideas

Obstacle courses can be so EASY to create and there are ENDLESS possibilities when it comes to creating your own.

Using them indoors or outdoors, the glory of creating your own obstacle course is that you can use whatever materials you have on hand. With a little imagination, you can turn just about anything into part of the course.  Here are a few ideas that I’ve come up with…

Outdoor ideas:

  • Use chalk to outline or mark parts of your course.
  • Jump over sticks or logs and make trails of pebbles or leaves.
  • Make a path through the leaves, snow, or sand.

According to Wikipedia, swimming pool sanitation is the process of ensuring healthy conditions in swimming pools, hot tubs, plunge pools, and similar recreational water venues.

Indoor ideas:

  • Use couch cushions or pillows to climb over or step on to really challenge balance and encourage strengthening.
  • Use painter’s tape on the floor to run through, jump over, or spin around on.
  • Climb through tunnels or a homemade streamer curtain.

DIY Rainbow Streamer Craft

Even more ideas:

  • Make it silly and add animal walks.
  • Make it imaginative and stay out of the hot lava floor but jumping to couch cushions, mats, or even squares of paper.
  • With multiple kids, have a “leader” create a course as you go. (I did this with my nieces and part of our course was sitting on the snow and spinning around on our bottoms). Kids come ups with some great ideas!

 

Most importantly, make it fun! Don’t be surprised if the kids take the lead and come up with their own ideas. It’s great for encouraging imagination, and if there is more than one child involved, cooperation and social skills are at play as well.  Comment some of your ideas below!

 

*Disclaimer: The information presented in the blog is intended for information and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your physician with any medical concerns and/or for medical advice. The information presented is not intended to be used in place of individualized therapy services, please contact your health care team for skilled therapy if you think it is necessary. Please supervise your children (or friends, spouses, etc) if you decide to try any of the activities or ideas presented as the author or this blog does not claim liability for possible injury or negative consequences related to the activities and ideas presented here.

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Fine Motor DIY Ornament Station

Easy Activities- Kids, Uncategorized Leave a comment

diy ornament station

It’s getting colder, and for many of us, it’s time to take down the water tables. Luckily, however, it is NOT the end of utilizing the water table for something different.

This week, I cleaned out our water table and brought it inside for some fun holiday fine motor crafting.

Every year, my kids enjoy making homemade ornaments, and this year, the water table is the perfect place to do this activity. Our water table provided a kid area that kept all the items (mostly) contained. We’ve done similar projects described below at a regular table, but the water table kept everything in one spot longer, and it kept the much-used dining table clear of our sensory materials/craft supplies. Another alternative idea that works great for sensory exploration is to use a simple shallow plastic bin if you don’t have a water table.

HOLIDAY SENSORY ACTIVITY

This DIY ornament station is super simple, yet it keeps little hands busy and entertained for double-digit minutes at a time (if you have or know a toddler, you know double digit entertainment is HUGE and often times hard to come by).

Here’s what we did:
We stocked up on the DIY plastic hollow ornaments and tons and tons of pompom balls. We chose holiday pompoms, but any pompoms are sure to please!

*Also, close adult supervision was included for the littles who tried to eat such fuzzy fun treasures*

The simple task of squeezing the pompoms into the ornaments kept my kids entertained and working on their bilateral motor skills, fine motor skill development, and provided some great sensory feedback. Providing different sizes of ornaments and different sizes of pompoms allows for a great toddler learning opportunity.

SENSORY TABLE ORNAMENT STATION

In addition to the ornaments, I provided my kids with some fun tools to provide free play and opportunities for additional motor skill acquisition.

The best part was that both of my kids came up with their own games in the days that followed the initial ornament filling! My son popped the pompoms allover (like “popcorn”) and then had the opportunity to clean it up (luckily he’s into brooms) and my daughter used these awesome scissor tongs to fill Santa’s sleigh with the holiday balls of goodness.

FINE MOtor

So, this has completed our first step to this year’s DIY ornaments! It was so much fun… stay tuned to see the finished (painted) product!

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*Disclaimer: The information presented in the blog is intended for information purposes only. Please consult your physician with any medical concerns and/or for medical advice. The information presented is not intended to be used in place of individualized therapy services, please contact your health care team for skilled therapy if you think it is necessary. Please supervise your children (or friends, spouses, etc)  if you decide to try any of the activities or ideas presented as the author or this blog does not claim liability for possible injury or negative consequences related to the activities and ideas presented here.


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Fun & Easy Pumpkin Activities

Easy Activities- Kids, sensory 1 Comment

OT Mom says, “It’s pumpkin season!”

And in my house, everyone cheers (even Dr. Dad)!

Pumpkin activities

It’s fall and I am totally on the pumpkin bandwagon. What’s not to love about pumpkins? They’re colorful, tasty, and irrevocably associated with the fall. In my house, we are all about the pumpkin crafts and activities. Here are my favorites so far this year:

Pumpkin Washing Station

Pumpkin Washing Station

We used our sand and water table to make a pumpkin washing station. Baby bubble bath made this activity safe and super fun. We also used wash clothes, a cloth sponge, and a nail scrubber for variety. This was a big hit several days in a row.

Fall Sensory
DecorationPumpkin “Sensory Bin” Center Piece

To decorate for fall and have a hands-on pumpkin inspired activity, I made this pumpkin bowl for our coffee table. As a filler, I used 99 cent foam pumpkins, a few real gourds, and a couple other sturdy wooden pumpkin decorations. They all feel and bit different and are not so fragile that I don’t mind my 2-year-old playing with them. I do have to admit, Dr. Dad does sometimes move this off the coffee table and out of reach when he is tired of finding the pumpkins and gourds out of the basket and across the room. So far, all of the contents have remained in one piece!

Paint a Pumpkin this Fall

Pumpkin Painting

We love painting in my house, so why not paint pumpkins and gourds?!? Last year we picked a nice day to paint outside, and this year we did it at the kitchen table. This year we also used the tiny paints that are connected, as my son is into pouring or mixing all the paint together to make a beautiful brown any chance he gets… check out these other messy play hacks to make messy play a little more manageable.

It's Pumpkin Season!

Tissue Paper Pumpkins

This one is pretty simple too- tear or cut up tissue paper and glue on a pumpkin, as easy as that. We used regular school glue and glue sticks. I love the hidden motor skill practice this activity has. Tearing up the tissue paper involves hand strength and bilateral coordination skills and gluing takes a bit more precision than simply slathering the paint on a pumpkin. We didn’t use scissors with ours, but I bet cutting out shapes or even faces for older kids would be a ton of fun.  While the finished product in our house wasn’t quite what I had in mind, my son loved it, and that’s what counts!

Pumpkin Sensory Bottle
Pumpkin Sensory Bottles

We’ve had a sensory bottle laying around that I made almost a year ago that has and handlful of random small items, mostly beads and the like and rice as a filler. One of the small items is a jack-o-lantern earring, and it’s my kid’s absolute favorite thing to look for in the bottle. So this fall we also made this pumpkin sensory bottle filled with pumpkin decorating filler, Halloween sprinkles, and tri colored dried cous cous as a filler. My kids argued over who got to play with it first, so we used it as “sharing tool.”

Just Explore

I LOVE PILES AND PILES OF PUMPKINS… and so do kids. Visiting a pumpkin patch is an Autumn must if you ask me. The numerous sizes, shapes, and colors of pumpkins, squash and gourds allow for kids to explore these natural beauties. It’s fun to compare the different kinds and sneak in all kinds of vocabulary and concepts with kids, such a big/small, colors, counting, you name it!

Fall explore pumpkins

I’m also looking forward to carving some pumpkins this month as well, playing in the goopy guts, and roasting some seeds. I have a feeling some of the above activities will follow us through fall as we are looking for fun ways to spend the season.  As alway, enjoy & I’d love to hear your thoughts about these pumpkin activities and favorites of your own!

 

 

*Disclaimer: The information presented in the blog is intended for information purposes only. Please consult your physician with any medical concerns and/or for medical advice. The information presented is not intended to be used in place of individualized therapy services, please contact your health care team for skilled therapy if you think it is necessary. Please supervise your children (or friends, spouses, etc)  if you decide to try any of the activities or ideas presented as the author or this blog does not claim liability for possible injury or negative consequences related to the activities and ideas presented here.

Non-Candy, Skill Promoting Easter Gift Ideas

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Dr. Dad says, “Let’s not go overboard with the Easter candy this year.”

OT Mom says, “Great idea, I have some better alternatives in mind.”

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While my husband is not a pediatrician, according to recent research, he’s right on the money when it comes to limiting excess sugar in our kids’ diets.  In a recent scientific statement published by the American Heart Association (2016), too much sugar is linked to risk factors for heart disease such as elevated blood pressure and an increased risk of obesity.

They recommend that kids over 2 years old consume no more than six teaspoons (25 grams) of added sugar per day and that children under 2 years avoid it altogether. With so many sugary snacks marketed to kids, these recommendations are surely good to keep in mind this Easter.  For more nutritional guidelines for kids, broken down by age group, check out MayoClinic.org Nutrition for Kids Information.

So this Easter, instead of filling those baskets and eggs with sugar, why not go for goodies that  promote developmental skills? In addition to the sugar being a nutrition downfall, in our house some of it ends up getting thrown out anyway, so it turns into a waste of money as well.

That being said, here are my favorite alternatives to candy and a little bit about why they can be much more beneficial than sugary snacks:

ART INSPIRED

Art supplies

This list could be almost endless, but engaging in art projects has a ton of benefits for the development of skills such as fine motor, visual motor/hand-eye coordination, bilateral coordination, visual perceptual, and in-hand manipulation skills. The items you could choose from are almost as endless as the benefits. A few ideas to get you started include: child-safe scissors, sidewalk chalk, stickers, markers, paint, crayons, glue and accessories to glue (feathers, noodles, cut out shapes/pictures, pom poms, etc).

There are also a lot of little craft sets available that come with everything you need or you can compile your own. A favorite project of my son’s is  painting wooden ornaments with watercolors. Another idea could be a small notepad with a set of stickers and markers.

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Bubbles

From traditional bubble wands to the newer whacky, bubble blowers, you can’t go wrong with bubbles. This activity is great for visual tracking skills, oral motor skills, and visual motor skills to name a few.

Self care items

As a child I often got a toothbrush in my stocking from Santa. I think the Easter Bunny could do something similar. Getting something like a toothbrush, comb, or even  a special pair of socks may encourage your little one to practice the self care skill related to that item with more motivation.

Books

In my opinion, you can never have too many books. Reading with your children not only promotes literary and language skills, but is a great time to bond with them. Try to pick out books specific to your child’s age.

Play Dough

If we didn’t already have tons of this stuff, it’d be right at the top of my list. Play dough is so much fun and can help with hand strengthening, proprioceptive input for the hands, tactile exploration, bilateral coordination, and more. There are tons of homemade recipes you can find online if you don’t want the store bought stuff.

Blocks and/or Legos

Blocks are great for learning spacial relationships and promoting motor skills. Building with blocks encourages problem solving, creativity, and self esteem.   Legos add the need for hand strength and provide some sensory input (proprioception) into the little joints of the hand.

Balls

So many motor skills are at work when throwing, catching, kicking, or bouncing a ball. From small to large and everything in-between, balls are always a great gift.

www.OTMOMSAYS.com

Fidget/Sensory Toys

Anything with fun textures are especially great for young kids or kids with sensory needs. Restless hands benefit from exploring different textures, so things like rubbery squeeze toys, bumpy balls, crinkly textures, fabrics and the like could work. Sensory items that are geared for the visual sense are great too, such as sensory bottles.

Bug Gathering Equipment

It’s spring, so let’s get the kids outside! I think a butterfly net and an insect viewer are perfect spring time outside toys. This encourages outdoor exploration, problem solving, and motor planning.

Gardening Tools

Not really up for the bugs? How about some gardening instead. Kid sized spades, gardening gloves, and watering cans can make a great spring themed basket.

Seeds

In addition to the gardening tools, what about some seeds? Perhaps the Easter Bunny could leave some carrot seeds for your kids to plant for him!

Sand Toys

If you don’t have sand toys, now’s a good time to get some. Playing in the sand at the beach or in a sandbox is such a fun tactile sensory experience, and adding tools such as shovels, buckets, rollers, and sand molds add motor development into the mix.

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Kites

Kites are the best reason to hope for a windy day. They’re fun to watch in the sky, but can take a lot of skill to get into the air and maintain their momentum. Both of my children are very young, so I get the kite started for them then hand it over. Older kids can have the chance to practice to do it with minimal or no help.

Finger Puppets

Not only are finger puppets fun, they promote finger isolation, bilateral coordination, body awareness, tactile (touch) discrimination, and imaginative play.

Musical Instruments

From motor skills, to language development, and an overall fun sensory experience, musical instruments are wonderful. Take your choice from maracas, drums, recorders or kazoos (for an oral motor bonus), bells, xylophones, etc. Jam on, little people!

Flashlights

Not only do kids love flashlights, they can be used in a way that promote visual tracking, visual memory, and visual motor skills. Try using flashlights for games such as watching you make a pattern on the wall with the light and then having them copy it with their own flashlight.

Tweezers and Tongs

Using tweezers can help with hand muscle strengthening, coordination, development of the arches of your hand, and allows kids to learn to use effective grasp patterns that promote differentiating the two sides of their hand (an important skill for fine motor development).

Non-Candy

Yoga/movement cards

Activities such as yoga provide some powerful prorioceptive input that do amazing things for our kids, you can read more about proprioception here.

Card games

Games are great for teaching turn taking, problem solving, and attention skills.

Squirt toys

Water play is an easy,  but not terribly messy activity that gets kids up, moving, and using their hands. Squeezing the variety of squirt toys available these days can strengthen little hands, while engaging in the sensory experience of it.

Pretend Play Toys

This is a broad category, but pretend play is an important skill that helps children in multiple areas of develop. Pretend play promotes thinking skills, creativity, social-emotional development, and cognitive flexibility. Toys such as cooking sets, cleaning sets, doll houses, etc. are all good choices.

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Healthy Treats

Instead of jelly beans in ALL the easter eggs, I think we’re going to have raisins in some. Or you could try fresh fruit instead of fruit flavored candy. Perhaps the Easter Bunny will leave a few of his carrots behind as well. Toddlers are notoriously picky eaters, but maybe if there’s a special healthy treat left by the Bunny, himself, the kids might try it! It’s worth a shot. I’m hoping my son will regain his appreciation of carrots.

Now the hard part is deciding which ones to go for!  I think I might need a couple bigger baskets. Do you have some more ideas? I’d love to hear them 🙂

References:

Vos, M. B., Kaar, J. L., Welsh, J. A., Van Horn, L.,V., Feig, D. I., Anderson, C. A. M., . . . and Council, o. H. (2016). Added sugars and cardiovascular disease risk in children: A scientific statement from the american heart association. Circulation, Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1859733288?accountid=143111

*Disclaimer: The information presented in the blog is intended for information purposes only. Please consult your physician with any medical concerns and/or for medical advice. The information presented is not intended to be used in place of individualized therapy services, please contact your health care team for skilled therapy if you think it is necessary. Please supervise your children (or friends, spouses, etc)  if you decide to try any of the activities or ideas presented as the author or this blog does not claim liability for possible injury or negative consequences related to the activities and ideas presented here.

10 Noodle Activities for Kids

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Upon returning home from grocery shopping one evening, my three-year-old was running around the house with a box of noodles looking for something.

Dr. Dad watched him in confusion and finally asked, “are we going to eat those noodles?”

OT mom said, “Probably not.”

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Our son was looking for the laces that go to his lacing card activity set. You can tell he hangs out with his OT mom a lot, as he views this food as so much more than potential dinner. There are just so many fun things that you can do with a box of noodles besides simply eating them. My three-year-old was one the right track when he was looking for his the laces to his lacing cards, which brings us to our first activity.

(Please keep in mind, though, that many young kids will try to put dry noodles in their mouth, so always keep them under close supervision. Some types of dried pasta can also break or crack leading to sharp edges).

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1. Lace/string them. This activity promotes a lot of great skills, including bilateral coordination and fine motor control. Prior to learning to write and before little hands can complete advanced fine motor skills, some prerequisite abilities are needed, such as strength, coordination, and the ability to utilize a variety of grasp patterns efficiently. This activity includes the need for more mature grasp patterns (such as the pincer grasp and three-jaw-chuck) and encourages wrist extension (also needed in for higher level fine motor skills, including writing) and challenges visual motor skills. You can make this activity even more educational by including patterns to the stringing or practicing counting while stringing.

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2. Sort them. You can do this a couple different ways: using visual and/or tactile discrimination. Learning to sort is a great activity for young kids. It teaches children to recognize similarities and differences. You can make this a fun game by having kids rely on only their tactile sense to discriminate different kinds of pastas (a sense known as stereognosis). To do this, occlude your child’s vision from the bowl of pasta and have them try to identify the different shapes without seeing them.

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3. Use pasta in a sensory box! Sensory boxes are a great and quick activity go-to. You can use smaller pastas for activities that are similar to those you could do in a sand box or rice box. Adding different textures or sizes of noodles can be fun, or just one unified kind can be used as well. I really like giving my kids little cups and spoons so they can scoop, pour, and stir the noodles. If you really think about the ability to be able to accurately pour and scoop, there is a lot going on. You practice your proprioceptive sense to adjust the right muscle force as to not throw the pasta across the room. You use visual motor skills to be able pour directly into what you intend to. You get a lot of sensory feedback from the restriction of the noodles as you stir and move them and you can hear them rattle around as you are doing so. Kids just love it, and there’s a lot they gain from it.

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4. Glue them/use them as an art medium. My kids love art and sometimes it’s great to break away from the usual crayons and markers. I remember making macaroni pictures as a kid, and years later my own kids still embrace this classic activity. Not only is creativity engaged, but once agin fine motor manipulation of the small piece is needed and practiced. You can find tons of ideas online (try pinterest) or let your kids free style it. Above is the one we came up with this week.

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5. Use them as an art tool. Who needs a paint brush, when you have a noodle? Well, we had a bunch of rigatoni noodles hanging around and I thought that the circular shape would be fun to make four leaf clovers for some St. Patrick’s Day crafting. I thought they turned out looking like clovers, but my son called them “butterflies.” I think that works too! We also made caterpillars and flowers. The most fun part was that the paint made little paint bubbles most of the time we “stamped” with the noodles.

6. Learn with them. Why not use a multi sensory approach to learning with noodles? You can line them up to learn letters or build a person to learn body awareness and body concept. My son liked counting out the right amount of noodle pieces for two eyes and ten fingers. You can make and copy patterns to work towards early math skills. You can play a visual memory game in trying to recall what kind of pastas were on a tray after having your kids look at them for a minute then taking them away. The options are as endless as the noodle varieties.

7. Pretend with them. Pretend play is an important area of play and contributes to social emotional development for kids, and pasta is an easy tool to let their imaginations run wild. I have an old blender that I often pull out (NOT including the sharp parts) as well as some bowls, spoons, whisks, etc. to allow my kids to “cook” in the kitchen while I make dinner.

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8. Stick them in play dough. This sounds simple enough, and it is. Pushing the noodles into play dough strengthens hand muscles that will be necessary for writing and other self care and fine motor tasks young kids need as they develop. You can also hide smaller noodles in the play dough for a sort of dig and find game.

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9. Shake them up! What kid doesn’t like to make noise? I think I remember doing something similar with beans as a child. Noodles work just as well. Find some kind of old cup or container (we used a couple plastic take and toss cups) and pour some noodles in. Cover the end with wax paper or parchment paper secured with a rubber band and shake away. This activity can get your kids up and moving and I think it’s just more fun to make your own toys sometimes. We used two different kinds of pasta shapes, and talked about the subtle difference in sounds each shaker had.

10. Free play. I was just about out of noodle ideas whey my kids came up with their own. My son decided to use them in place of the balls that came with an activity play set involving ramps. He found that the noodles slid down the ramps just fine, and he could jam enough of them in the toy to kind of line them up. This activity actually kept him entertained for nearly 45 minutes (Dr. Dad was impressed). My younger child usually prefers sticking them in cups and empty bottles but also joined her brother in the slide the noodle game. Either way, free play allowed them some unstructured kid time to just explore this item and see how it interacted with their environment. How fun is that?

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What might be the best thing about all of these ideas is that noodles are super cheap. So even if you don’t end up eating them, why not try something fun with a box dried pasta goodness? A lot of these activities you can use with other household goods, like rice, dried beans, cereal, etc. I like using pasta since it’s a little less messy than rice and my youngest seems less likely to eat it than things like beans that could be mistaken for candy, etc. If you have even more ideas, use your noodle and leave a comment! 🙂

 

*Disclaimer: The information presented in the blog is intended for information and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your physician with any medical concerns and/or for medical advice. The information presented is not intended to be used in place of individualized therapy services, please contact your health care team for skilled therapy if you think it is necessary. Please supervise your children (or friends, spouses, etc) if you decide to try any of the activities or ideas presented as the author or this blog does not claim liability for possible injury or negative consequences related to the activities and ideas presented here.