GreatBigStory.com is owned by CNN. Some say it was created as an alternative to Buzzfeed. It contains short, narrated video clips. These video clips are great to use as a springboard in your sessions.
Start by watching these videos and you will see what we mean:
Welcome back! This week we move on to the development of grasps that are more functional, meaning that they allow us to do specific tasks with more efficiency and skill, such as holding a pencil and writing. Also, we’ll touch on some of what kids’ fingers need to do to help them hold their pencils and things.
As babies develop, you will see them begin to use the pincer grasp. A pincer grip is the use of an index finger and thumb to pick up, hold, and release an object. This is a more precise and refined grip than the palmar grasp or cylindrical grasp. Although you probably hold an object with your thumb and index finger opposing each other, a child will initially use their thumb and the side of their index finger.
It is important for a child to develop this grasp as it is used for functional activities such as opening or closing buttons, zippers, laces, early handwriting, and scissor skills. Children will need to have mastered the pincer grasp to properly grip a pencil or pair of scissors.
When working with a child who is developing the pincer grasp, you want to encourage him to engage in fun activities that help develop and refine the pincer grip. Here’s a good list of ideas for activities:
Using tweezers to pick up objects and dropping them into containers
Threading beads
Play-dough – pinching, squeezing, patting, poking and pulling it
Pulling toys using a string
Lacing and sewing boards
Picking up small objects such as rice, beads, marbles, raisins and lentils between the thumb and forefinger and placing them into containers
Tearing paper into strips
Peeling off small stickers to make into a picture
Turning pages in a book
Making paper chains
‘Fuzzy Felt’
Playing games with clothes pegs
Making pipe cleaners into shapes, objects, or animals
Popping bubble wrap
Let’s move to another developmental milestone which is important for young children as they use their hands more functionality. Finger isolation refers to the ability to point with one, specific finger at a time. This is important for your child to be able to do as it helps with the development of more refined grasps such as the pincer grasp and pencil grip, and will aid them with functional activities such as handwriting, using scissors, opening and closing buttons, using zippers and laces, and using a knife and fork.
There are a bunch of good activities you can do with children to help promote finger isolation:
Drawing in shaving foam or whipped cream with a finger
Flicking a ping-pong ball or cotton wool ball using fingers
Playing with finger puppets
Finger rhymes such as ‘Round and round the garden like a teddy bear’ or ‘Eensy weensy spider’
Using a typewriter, keyboard or piano
Pressing beads or poking holes into Play-dough using each finger in turn
Dialing the numbers of a toy telephone
One more important skill for today: Hand arches. The development of arches in the hand is essential for fine manipulation. Arches – the way the fingers are shaped while while holding objects such as a pencil, allow for controlled pressure and skilled movements of the fingers. They also help the hand to hold objects with sufficient strength. If these arches are not developed appropriately, your child may experience difficulties with gripping and using tools such as a knife and fork, pencils and scissors.
Activities to help develop hand arches include:
Shaking dice using a cupped hand
Cutting Play-dough using a knife or pizza slice
Writing with chalk on a chalkboard using all four fingertips and the thumb
Using a dressmaker’s wheel to make dotted lines on paper or card
Using a turkey baster to blow ping-pong balls or cotton wool balls across a table
Using Play-dough to make balls and press them into the palm of the hand
Using tweezers or tongs to pick up small objects
Playing games with pegs
Any activity with buttons, coins or small objects
Card games
Squeezing games using sponges, bubble wrap, and Play-dough.
That’s it for now. After Pesach we will dive into a treatment planning discussion, to help put some of the knowledge and milestones we discussed into treatment sessions that help kids develop good handwriting.
Hey OTs (and anyone else interested in helping kids with handwriting!)
Let’s spend some time this week discussing the development of grasps, which are simply the ways we hold things in our hands. One of the first stages of a child’s development is the use of a palmar grasp, and this grasp is a building block for all other fine motor skills that come later. Also important at this stage is a baby’s ability to release from the palmar grasp.
In a palmar grasp, babies hold on object that is in their palm by wrapping their fingers down around it, without using their thumb. It is interesting to observe that a baby may crudely grasp a small object using his palm and all four fingers, even though the object could be grasped more efficiently with just two fingers or a finger and his palm.
Sometimes a baby will be delayed in acquiring this grasp, or may have difficulty keeping object in his hand. Some activities to help promote gross grasp, grasp strength, and release include squeezing water from sponges at bath time, squeezing play-dough, scrunching up paper into balls, stacking blocks on top of one another, or throwing objects.
One interesting thing about the palmar grasp is that it’s actually a reflex – babies will close their hand on something placed in their palm reflexively. You might have noticed that this grasp is pretty strong, and babies can often support their own weight using this grasp. Just be careful – a baby can release suddenly without any reason! Don’t you love when a baby grasps your index finger with his palm and four fingers? It’s one of the cutest things a baby will do!
The palmar grasp is referred to as a crude grasp, and after this stage babies begin to develop more functional grasps, such as a cylindrical grasp, which begins to involve the movement of the wrist. This grasp is also called the barrel grasp, because it looks like the child’s fingers are in the shape of a barrel around whatever she is grasping.
In this grasp, a child can manipulate the object she is holding by using gross arm movements, but also slightly finer movement with the wrist. Little kids will often hold their crayons this way as they begin coloring and doodling. If you try writing with this grasp you will see that it doesn’t produce very legible writing, and your arm, wrist, and hand will tire quickly. Still, this grasp is an improvement over the reflexive, primitive palmar grasp, and it’s important that babies progress to more and more functional grasps.
If a child needs help developing a strong cylindrical grasp you may want to try one these activities which will help develop this grasp:
Pushing or pulling toys
‘Row, row, row your boat’ – holding a broom stick
Tug-of-war
Tipping water from a cup or beaker, or pouring from one container into another
Holding onto the rope of a swing
Holding onto the handles of a tricycle or pedal car
The good news is that these are fun for kids! Come back next week for more on grasps, and tips to help children develop their grasps and handwriting.
So, you spend your days helping children with their handwriting… Did you ever wonder if you were really making a major difference to the children that you work with? (You don’t have to admit it.) The good news is that you are.
Research shows that there is a fundamental correlation between motor and cognitive development. Specifically, there are relationships between fine motor skills and higher order cognitive skills. Our job as OTs is to facilitate fine motor development for better participation in school. But we do that we are also facilitating improvement in the students’ cognitive abilities, which also affects success in school.
How is this so? Motor activities help support and stimulate brain development. Think about child development through a child’s first year. All of his development is through motor and sensory exploration, which is why every object – too small, entirely disgusting, etc. – ends up in your baby’s mouth! Babies are learning, developing understanding of their worlds, by moving, touching, and tasting lekarna-slovenija.com. Going through these developmental stages in the beginning of a baby’s life directly impacts brain and cognitive development.
Since the natural sequence of development originates from motor and sensory exploration, let’s talk about fine motor skills development through infancy. Fine motor skills refer to the small movements of the hands, wrists, fingers, feet, toes, lips, and tongue. These actions involve the movement of small muscles in the body. These small muscles control smaller actions such as grasping an object.
Understanding when skills are supposed to emerge helps us to get a better understanding of proper age level expectations and understand the delays and functioning levels of our students. This understanding helps us to plan treatments that stimulate and facilitate proper motor and sensory experiences and development for skill attainment in students. This table is a timeline of significant fine motor milestones:
Newborns
Their tiny hands are closed and all grasping is reflexive (Darwinian reflex) which is integrated by 2-3 months.
Two weeks
These little guys will flail at objects.
Eight weeks
Babies discover their hands.
2-4 months
Around this time, they start developing eye-hand coordination skills. This refers to the ability to grasp and touch an object while looking at it. They develop this through a good deal of trial and error.
4-5 months
A baby can grasp an object that she sees within reach.
6 months
Now babies can hold and bang objects together.
12 months
Around this time, babies learn to use a pincer grasp, meaning they can hold objects between the thumb and index finger. This gives the baby a better ability to hold and move objects and to intentionally drop them.
One year
These big (kind of) kids can hold, drop, stack, and nest objects
Toddler
Begin to draw (includes shapes in pictures), play with blocks, fold paper and string large beads.
Preschool
Fine motor development is varied in this age group.
School Age
By age five, a student can draw a person, cut, paste, draw, fasten buttons, tie laces, and right- or left-handedness is established. Eye-hand coordination is mastered between the ages of 6-12.
The progression of fine motor skills is a key component to skill acquisition. Come back next week, when we will begin to discuss activities and ideas to facilitate the development of each stage, by focusing on the development of grasps.
Want to hear about an effective and versatile therapy tool that the kids love too? They’re called Clics, and they can be commonly found in stores (Amazing Savings anyone?), or online for as little as $15-$20.
Click here for link I may have pilfered a few from my son’s toy collection…shhh
And my favorite thing about them? It just takes two Clics and your awesome visual cue is ready to go!
Morphology: Teaching grammatical verb inflections can be made fun and engaging with this simple visual. Whether it’s regular past tense –ed, present progressive –ing, or plural –s, students with language-learning disabilities will be able to concretely see how we add on parts to end of verbs to change meaning. The first Clic is used for the base verb (e.g. Clap or Climb). For students with more limited vocabulary, you can tape little pictures to the Clic to show the verb. On a second different colored Clic, I then write the targeted grammatical inflection (e.g. ed) with dry erase marker (comes right off when you’re done;-)) and attach the second Clic to the first base word Clic. Tada!
Now, when modeling the use of the grammatical inflection, you have an effective visual to accompany your words. Once the students become more comfortable with the visual, you can then fade the verbal model, and use the Clics as a visual support that the kids can use during writing tasks and in conversation!
Pragmatics: Clics have definitely come in handy while working on topic maintenance and turn-taking with my students on the Autism spectrum and with Attention Deficit Disorder. I often begin by holding up two connected Clics to the students, and explaining that in order to have a conversation, the speaker and the listener need to be “connected” or have “connected thoughts.”
So if I’m talking about pizza (point to the first Clic) and you’re talking about pizza (point to the second Clic)…then we are connected. But if I’m talking about pizza, and you’re talking about the snow (I then break the Clics apart and pair it together with a confused facial expression ), then our conversation is broken!
Throughout our sessions, I will then leave the connected Clics as a visual reminder of staying on topic, and when I catch a student in the act of making tangential responses, I simply break the connected Clics and voila! I have the student’s attention. I then point again to the first Clic, reiterate the topic that was being spoken about, and have the student reflect on what they can say to connect our conversation again. A correct response is then rewarded by having the student actively connect the Clics back together. You can take data by marking how many times the Clics were broken during a session. With turn taking, I often have each student choose his own colored Clic, connect them together, and then use colored Clics as a visual reminder of whose turn it is to speak. This visual/kinesthetic cue has such an effective impact, that my students will still refer to it years later, even when that visual is long gone from their sessions.
Topic Maintenance Visual: Pizza and Pizza=ConnectedTurn-Taking
Articulation/Phonological Processes: What an easy way to demonstrate using our “tail sounds” for fi
nal consonant deletion! Similar to using it for grammatical inflections, I will often point to the first Clic to represent the first part of the word (e.g. moo….) and then point to the second Clic and emphasize the final sound (e.g. /n/) and then sweep back to say “moon.” If a student forgets their “tail” sound, then I simply break apart or bend the second Clic backwards to show how the final sound was missing. Students are often able to self-correct using the visual. I have also used the Clics for producing consonant clusters, with each Clic representing a different sound in the cluster.
But wait there’s more….
Clics can be used as a useful visual cue for prefixes/suffixes, phonemic awareness and even synonyms/antonyms (same color for synonyms, different for antonyms). And to add to its versatility, you can tape on pictures or write on them with dry erase markers based on the needs of the student and the targeted goal.
So let me hear, what tricks can you do with your Clics?
Please share other therapy ideas you may have for Clics, or post a Clic success story below!
Hi! My name is Miriam Gewirtz and I am a school-based OT working in elementary and middle schools. I have a lot of great ideas and tips I’ve come across over the years, and I look forward to sharing them with you each week.
Did you know that 90% of elementary school teachers say they feel unprepared to teach handwriting? This should ring true to OTs working in schools. If schools provide any handwriting instruction past kindergarten, it stops by the time students are in third grade. This means that OTs are the ones in our schools who have the expertise and know-how to teach students to write legibly, and this has become one of the main school-based goals that occupational therapists address.
Handwriting legibility and speed of writing is an important skill for students. Students are expected to fill out worksheets, tests, and take notes, usually by hand. If handwriting is a source of frustration or difficulty, the actual learning in school becomes even more challenging for students. In fact, some students have so much trouble with handwriting that they are told to type instead, to avoid the distraction that handwriting is for them (and their teachers who must decipher it!)
Interestingly enough, research shows that the actual act of writing helps in the learning process. This is because the activity of writing activates specific pathways in the brain. (Let’s talk more on this in a future post about writing vs. typing for students with handwriting difficulties.)
First, though, let’s spend some time talking about handwriting basics – the things that work in kids who write legibly and create the underlying deficiencies that lead to poor handwriting in others. Some topics I will address will be about how handwriting difficulties can be attributed to poor fine motor skills, poor visual perceptual skills, or poor visual motor skills.
The ASHA- Connect event is held in a different state every summer. This year it will be held in Baltimore from July 20- July 22. It will be divided into 3 specific groups:
Schools Connect.
Private Practice Connect.
Health Care Connect.
This really makes sense because most SLPs work with a specific population and benefit from CEUs and interactions with other SLPs working with the same population. Sure, there is some redundancy between them but many challenges and issues are unique to the setting that you work in.
If you’re able to join it’s a wonderful opportunity to make connections and learn something new.
This game is sorta difficult for discerning the differences in the items. Pictures can be funny and humorous for adults. Some may need to be removed over sensitivity to people at the beach or other scenes. Great for asking and answering ‘wh’ questions and getting conversations started.
This is the perfect game to use for working on colors and sorting. Kids will be challenged with the use of the tweezers and will try to snatch the right fruit.
Also good for turn taking, mine/yours, simple”wh” questions, and increasing MLU.
