Fine Motor Friday - Prewriting Skills

Occupational Therapists study occupation. What is the occupation of a child? Simply put, it's play. Learning and growing in the area of fine motor development is crucial to a child's development of play and ultimately helps facilitate their later ability to be a successful student.

By profession, I'm a pediatric occupational therapist although I spend pretty much all my time being a mom. Boo is now 3 years old and it is getting easier to pull out some of my work stuff and start working on fine motor skills. It helps me too because I get to dust off those distance corners of my brain and start thinking OT again. Let's explore development and have some fun.

Prewriting -
There are lots of fun ways to work on prewriting skills. I recently pulled out these wood pieces from Handwriting Without Tears (HWT). I use a lot of their material for writing practice.



I should tell you that these are intended to practice capital letters but as you can see I broke the rules a little. Forming capital letters is much easier than forming lowercase and should be worked on first. Another great thing you can work on are the concepts of "top", "middle" and "bottom". I have found the best way to start working on these concepts is on your own body and have your child model it. For example, "put your hands on top of your head", "where is your middle?", "your toes are at the bottom of your body". You get the idea. Forming letters involves knowing where top, middle and bottom are and many letters start at the top. In fact, the HWT program has a song about "always start your letters at the top".

Using something tangible helps with these concepts too. You can touch them, move them and physically identify the top, middle and bottom of the pieces. I also likes how it simplified letter formation to "little lines", "big lines", "little curves" and "big curves". Boo picked up these terms easily and had fun finding the different shapes.

The Mommy Pedestal

I was talking to another mommy friend last night about the magnitude of motherhood. I have been thinking about this a lot. My girls are with me all day and it seems most days our moods overlap and intertwine. Almost sickly sometimes. I don't feel like I'm able to have a bad day, or even a bad moment for that matter, because it reflects right back to them. If I lose my temper with Boo she loses it and can't recover until I have gone in there. I get so frustrated with her sometimes but there she is screaming at my husband "I want Mommy!!!". I just spend all day with you and then I yelled at you but yet, still, she wants Mommy.

Let's call it the "Mommy Pedestal" - you are put up there each day and no matter how bad you screw up your children still want you, only you. It's a huge responsibility. Sometimes it seems like a burden but I don't want to undermine it with that word. It's a privilege. Even more so if you do a good job.

Some days though, I just want down.

Check me out!!

Want to know more about me?! I've been interviewed by Sue from Motherhood and Me as part of a new "Well, I didn't know that" series. It was a great honor. Thanks Sue!! I had a great time answering the questions.