Today we are sharing with you a simple slime recipe that you can make at home. Making slime is a great opportunity to work on those fine motor and bimanual skills. Play doh and therapy putty is a well-known tool for building fine motor skills in kids. However you can also use slime to target hand strength and dexterity that is needed for functional tasks, and the kids will love it! Try these fine motor activities with your next batch of homemade slime (recipe below):
Slime recipe
Method
Today we are going to share with you some OT ‘hacks’ to support children to play and explore their environment as well as to develop their fine motor skills. An OT hack is any trick, shortcut, or new method that allows a person to more fully participate in activities that are important or meaningful to them. Play is a child’s most important occupation so here are some simple and easy to do strategies using household items to help develop fine motor skills and support success in play.
Self care skills are the everyday tasks undertaken so children are ready to participate in life activities e.g. dressing, eating, cleaning teeth. They are often referred to as the activities of daily living (ADL’s). Self care skills are one of the first ways that children develop the ability to plan and sequence task performance and to develop the refined physical control required to carry out daily tasks (e.g. opening lunch boxes, drawing or standing to pull up pants).
Self care skills act as precursors for many school related tasks as well as life skills. Some children can have difficulties with completing self care tasks and this can be because of conditions that affect development, an injury or differences in individual learning styles and needs. Our job as Occupational Therapists is to help children to live more independently and participate in these important daily tasks. Here are some strategies to support independence and involvement in some self care tasks.
Play and hand skills – 0 to 12 months
It is a child’s "job" or "occupation" to play! The great benefit of play is that it is fun whilst developing physical coordination, emotional maturity, social skills to interact with other children, and self-confidence to try new experiences and explore new environments.
Some children can have difficulties with play and learning. This can be because of conditions that affect development, an injury or perhaps differences in individual learning styles and needs. If a child’s play and ability to learn is affected, then their independence, health and how they feel about themselves will be impacted. Our job as Occupational Therapists is to help children to live more independently to improve their capacity to continue to play and learn.
A significant aspect of play involves hand skills or fine motor skills. These skills refer to the coordinated use of the small muscles in the hands and fingers to complete precise and accurate motions such as touching, reaching and grasping. These motions not only enable exploration of the child’s world but also the facilitation of key developmental areas that include imaginative play, social interaction and communication. In order for Occupational Therapists to support a child in developing the next stage of skills, it is important to know how skills are developed!
The development of hand skills:
At around three months of age, children can hold small toys placed into their hands, explore their own hands, bring their hands/toys to the mouth, and reach and swipe out at dangling toys.
At around six months of age, children begin to grasp objects within their reach using their whole hand. They can start to hold onto toys for longer, explore toys using their mouth and reach for toys using both hands. It is also around this age that children start to learn to sit on their own freeing their hands to play with toys.
At around nine months of age, children begin to pass toys from one hand to another, hold toys between their fingers and thumb, hold a toy in each hand and purposely let go of toys onto a surface such as their highchair tray.
At around twelve months of age, children start to point at toys using their index finger, pick up small objects using their fingers and thumb and place objects in open containers or an adult's hand.
How understanding developmental milestones shape therapy strategies:
There is a lot of talk about developmental milestones and the ages that we might expect to see these skills emerge. For children with neurological conditions and injuries, the timestamp for these milestones is not our main focus, rather it is the identification of what skill stage the child is currently at. From there, therapy will aim to consolidate those skills so that it is used in their everyday repertoire and strategies and toys are selected to help progress to the next stage. The approach to achieving these skills (the type of therapy) and the dosage (how frequently it needs to be practiced) is where research comes in. Research tells us how to and how much so that you get the “most bang for your buck”.
Here are some helpful strategies to select toys for each stage of development:
Early fine motor skills
Developing more precise fine motor skills
Do you want more information? This is a great website that outlines development and is a great source of information
Play and hand skills – Toddler years
Play is an important part of a child’s early development. Playing helps children learn and develop by discovering and exploring the world around them. Discovery is dependent on opportunities for ‘trial and error’ to understand what works and what doesn’t and this is very commonly seen when babies transition into toddlers.
Toddlers are very busy and inquisitive at this stage of development and they thrive on interactions and exploration of their environment. Every child is different and there is a big range of ‘normal’ in children’s development. As therapists we aim to facilitate and encourage this natural curiosity and provide strategies to further develop these essential skills to promote independence, participation in daily activities and improve their capacity to play and learn.
The three areas that therapists can focus on during this developmental stage are fine motor skills, play and social interactions/communication.
The development of hand skills:
After mastering skills such as reaching and grasping a toy, the next step is to refine and develop more precise and controlled movements that allow children to complete more complex tasks. This may include using a fork or spoon, putting pen to paper and isolating fingers to point to an object they desire. This stage of development sees children begin to use both hands in a more coordinated way to push, pull, turn, stack toys and pull them apart and build them up again. During this stage, we see progression from using the whole hand to grasp or using a ‘raking’ motion, to a pincer grasp using the thumb and index finger to pick up small items with accuracy.
The development of play and social skills:
Toddlers are experimenting, thinking, solving problems and learning all the time. Play is vital for a toddler’s cognitive development, because it’s one of the main ways toddlers explore the world. Through exploration and experimentation, toddlers develop the ability to think, understand, communicate, make memories, imagine and work out what might happen next. Imaginative play, role playing and turn taking are all vital components of this stage of learning.
The development of communication skills:
These early years are the optimal time for children to experience both expressive (communicating needs and wants) and receptive (understanding basic conversation) communication opportunities. Toddlers communicate using a combination of sounds, gestures, and facial expressions. Reading with children at this stage on a regular basis is such an effective way to foster these opportunities. Books provide great opportunities to ask toddlers to point to objects on a page, imitate words and later progress towards “who/what/where” questions..
How understanding developmental milestones shape therapy strategies:
There is a lot of talk about developmental milestones and the ages that we might expect to see these skills emerge. For children with neurological conditions and injuries, the timestamp for these milestones is not our main focus, rather it is the identification of what skill stage the child is currently at. From there, therapy will aim to consolidate those skills so that it is used in their everyday repertoire and strategies and toys are selected to help progress to the next stage. The approach to achieving these skills (the type of therapy) and the dosage (how frequently it needs to be practiced) is where research comes in. Research tells us how to and how much so that you get the “most bang for your buck”.
Here are some helpful strategies to select toys for each stage of development:
Strategies to develop these skills
Do you want more information? This is a great website that outlines development and is a great source of information
School readiness skills (3 to 5 years)
School readiness refers to a child’s readiness to make a smooth and successful transition into more formal schooling whether that be pre school, kindergarten, or an early learning centre. These include social, language, play, self care and hand skills which, when well established, make learning easier for the child, teacher and parent.
Hand skills
We start to see children build on their foundation hand skills and begin to use their hands and fingers in a more skilful and coordinated way. This can be observed in activities when using a pencil to draw basic shapes such as a cross, circle or straight lines, when using scissors to cut along a straight line, or even using a spoon or fork to feed themselves.
We also start to see children favouring one hand over the other for skilled parts of an activity. For example, when writing or drawing the preferred hand holds and uses the pencil whilst the other hand supports the paper. It is, however, common at this stage for children to swap hands and a real preference isn’t typically fully established at this point.
Some activities to promote hand skill development include:
Play and social skills
At this age children are very social and interested in the world around them. They are moving on from playing alongside other children to interacting with their peers. This requires many different skills such as turn taking, emotional regulation (ability to perceive and control emotions), reading social cues (such as body language and facial expressions) and attending to an activity.
Reading with your child is a great way to promote communication. Encourage your child to tell their own story based on the pictures of a book, ask lots of open ended questions such as “who/what/where/when” throughout the story or even create your own storybook with your child.
Communication
Communication at this age is very important as children are rapidly expanding their receptive communication (understanding who/what/where questions, understanding basic concepts such as big/little and on/under) and their expressive communication (which is communicating their needs, wants, thoughts and ideas). Children also begin to form more complex sentences, and their language becomes clearer and easier to understand, particularly for those outside of their immediate family. This may occur verbally, through key word sign, or low/hi tech communication devices.
Turn taking games support the development of both play and communication, and can be practiced using fun games such as blowing bubbles, stacking blocks, bowling and simple board games.
This age group is all about gaining more independence and acquiring skills that allow optimal engagement and participation in school-based activities
Fine motor skills
Fine motor skills develop naturally as your child gains the ability to control and coordinate their body. As fine motor skills continue to develop, children gain more independence in activities such as feeding and dressing. Some important fine motor skills include:
Keep in mind that some children might develop fine motor skills earlier or later than others, but incorporating fun activities into their daily routine can help improve their fine motor skills.
Some activities may include:
Some strategies to help cutting skills include:
Handwriting skills
Children develop handwriting ability at very different rates, and the development is ongoing throughout childhood. This is because handwriting is a very complex task that requires coordination of the small muscles of the hand, coordination of your vision and hand movements, and also a cognitive aspect to understand letters of the alphabet, writing from left to right and top to bottom. Handwriting is a tricky task for some children but it is a skill used at school to complete homework and assignments, and in every day tasks such writing a card or filling in forms.
Children start to use a more mature and dynamic pen grip using the thumb and index finger, with the wrist positioned slightly backwards (extension), and the forearm comfortably on the table. This sees movement initiated from the wrist and fingers as opposed to the elbow and shoulder that we tend to see earlier on in development. Children start to grasp letter formation, start to write their name and the alphabet.
Some strategies to support handwriting in the classroom include:
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