How We Help Clients Improve Fine Motor Skills
The next room I’m going to tell you about is our Fine Motor Room. We have Fine Motor Rooms in all of our clinics. When you visit one of these rooms you’ll see that, like in our other rooms, we don’t really have anything on the walls. Things on the walls look nice but they are a distraction for our kiddos. We only put up whatever is necessary for treatment.
What’s in our cubbies and cabinets
But even though the walls are bare we have lots of supplies! For instance, you’ll probably see a series of cubbies. These cubbies contain our functional living activities, for those things in daily life that require fine motor skills. For example, one of these cubbies is full of toy shoes that the kiddos can use to practice shoe tying! We also have items that let our clients practice lacing, as well as things like putty that work on strengthening the hands. We have a wealth of supplies inside these cubbies!
But we also have cabinets where we keep activities that use tongs, or clothespins; we have a sensorimotor tray that has kinetic sand. We also have a Lite Brite, as well as Play-Doh and Wikki Stix.
Our desk and chalkboard
We have a work desk in here where you can find pencil grippers, more tongs, markers, crayons, all kinds of pencils and erasers. We also have a laptop in here. It is portable, but if one of our young adults is working on an assignment, we can do that in here.
Besides all of that, this room contains a table that I love! It has a dry erase surface that you can flip to turn it into a chalkboard! This table also has a nice, big roll of paper at one end, which allows us to do larger activities.
This room is where we house all our fine motor writing curricula, such as Loops and Groups, Handwriting Without Tears, as well as First Strokes, which my friend Jan McCleskey created herself at The Handwriting Clinic.
Learning to organize
Another thing that we do in here is work on Organizational Binders. This is a big issue for many of our kids because their work is all scattered in a backpack and many of them have trouble organizing it. Learning how to organize work and put it and keep it in a binder requires a lot of fine motor work.
In other words, this room is set up for any kind of writing and fine-skilled activity you might need to perform. We can incorporate these skills into functional skills, or we can incorporate them into writing for school assignments.
The focus of our fine motor room
The focus of this room is fine motor skills, not crafts. We do have another room that has more of a craft focus, and of course, crafts incorporate fine motor skills. There is some crossover, like having kids cut things with scissors. But this room is strictly for fine motor skills.
We’d love for you to come to visit and see our Fine Motor Room!
