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Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills involve the small muscles of our fingers, hands, and arms. The development of these muscles will help your child perform activities for daily living (ADL) like hanging clothes, using cutlery, and preparing lunch. Fine motor skills are also necessary for academic success — including pencil manipulation, handwriting, keyboarding, cutting, and pasting.

The following building blocks are necessary to develop fine motor skills:

Bilateral Integration: Using your two hands together.

Crossing Mid-line: The ability to cross the imaginary line that divides the body into left and right sides.

Hand and finger strength: The ability to exert force against resistance using for controlled movement.

Eye hand coordination: The ability to process information received from the eyes to control, guide and direct the hands in the performance of the task.

Hand Dominance: The consistent use of one hand for a task performance.

Hand Division: Using the thumb, index and middle finger for manipulation and the fourth and little finger tucked into the palm for stability.

Object Manipulation: The ability to skillfully manipulate and control everyday tools, such as a toothbrush, hairbrush, pencils, scissors, and cutlery.

Body Awareness (Proprioception): Information that the brain receives from our muscles and joints to make us aware of our body position for more controlled movements.

Sensory Integration

Sensory integration challenges stem from your nervous system and make it difficult to receive, organize, and use sensory information. This makes it hard for a person’s body to adapt to a given physical environment and can lead to a variety of problems. Through fun and engaging activities, I help children learn to process and organize different sensations which are necessary for development.

The three most common sensory systems affected with sensory processing disorder are:

Vestibular: The sensory system that responds to changes in head and body movement through space, and that coordinates movements of the eyes, head, and body.

Proprioceptive: This sense underlies one’s ability to place body parts in a position in space and to grade movements (i.e. the ability to judge direction of force and pressure.

Tactile: Information taken into the body through the sense of touch (skin).

Visual Perception

Visual perception is the process of organizing information, and giving meaning to what we see. It is required to perform everyday tasks and is essential for learning in school.

Components of visual perception include:

Eye-hand coordination: Drawing precise straight or curved lines within a visual boundary.

Figure ground: The ability to see an object or form when presented in a complex background with a lot of visual information at one time.

Visual discrimination: The foundation for where an object or shape is classified according to color, form, pattern, size or position.

Position in space: This relates to understanding directional language concepts, such as in/out, up/down, in front of/behind/between, left/right, when relating to objects or shapes such as letters.

Visual memory: The ability to remember and recall objects, shapes, symbols, movements or a sequence of movements.

Visual motor integration: The ability to make sense of visual information and then use it appropriately when performing a motor task, such as writing.

Visual closure: The ability to visualize the whole of an object or picture when part of it is hidden or missing.

Form constancy: The ability to recognize forms and objects as the same in various situations.

Executive Function

Executive function skills help people get things done. Improving these skills will help your child to plan, focus their attention, remember instructions, and multi-task successfully.

These skills are an essential part of developing:

Working memory: The ability to retain and manipulate distinct pieces of information over short periods of time.

Mental flexibility: The ability to sustain or shift attention in response to different demands.

Self-control: The ability to set priorities and resist impulsive actions

Executive function incorporates:

Problem solving

Time management

Organization

Planning and prioritizing

Task initiation

Functional Life Skills

I feel that functional life skills support your child in school, at home, and during daily activities. Areas I will address include:

Phone skills

Money skills

Grocery shopping

Leisure time

Interpersonal skills

Safety awareness

Cooking

Setting a table

Folding and hanging clothes

Handwriting / Keyboarding

Handwriting and keyboarding are both complex skills that require practice to become fluent and automatic. Formal instruction in these areas can help your child build the foundational skills needed to express him or herself appropriately.

I utilize the following programs:

Handwriting Without Tears – print and cursive

Keyboarding Without Tears

TV Teacher