Fine Motor Friday - Holiday Fun

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. As Boo nears 3 years old 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.

Holiday Fun
I like working on Holiday projects together - well, any projects because it provides a wonderful opportunity to discuss the "progression" of an activity. What do we start with? How do we do that? I can let Boo lead the project with some guidance from me. She loves it and it allows her a sense of control and independence. Working to promote independence and build good self esteem is such an awesome thing to do for your child.

My favorite way to do these things is through forward chaining or backward chaining. Forward chaining refers to teaching your child how to do the first step in a task and backward chaining is teaching the last step. Both allow you to provide assistance while giving your child a sense of accomplishment. This is, of course, what occupational therapy is all about and ties into all areas of practice including fine motor development.

Looking at categories. Tasting the categories. Crunchy, sweet, gummy....

Looking at the instructions together and figuring out how to start

The finishing touches...

In the end the sugar rush caught up to us and we quickly ended and headed into some gross motor play. Lots of running, crashing into things and general craziness....