Fit 4 Fun Fitness

Gross and Fine Motor Skills for Special Education

Special needs students often lack gross and fine motor skills. Here are a list of game ideas you can use with severe and profound students to encourage physical activities in your classroom. These games can be used for preschool students through adults and easily can be transferred into the home.

Gross motor skills refer to the use of the legs and arms. Good games to encourage walking and running include tag, hide-and-go seek, and I Spy. Balance games include freezing games, statues, or musical games where students have to stand on one leg or move one arm in a specific direction. Walking on uneven surfaces such as water, sand, or snow teaches students to move carefully on various surfaces. Scooters, happy hops, bikes, yoga, stilts, and the game of Twister@ also teach good balance skills. Stop-and-go games are also good to utilize with quick, short, controlled movements. Races are also great to involve both the arms and legs movements. Listening games such as What is the Time, Mr. Wolf, Simon Says, and Mother May I involve other skills that use all five senses. Throwing a ball involves both gross and fine motor movements. Emphasis should be on good control of the ball, not perfect performance in games and activities.

Fine motor skills involve the small movements of the body. Do not wait to begin focusing on them until after the child has mastered the gross motor movements; instead, work on them alongside of the gross motor skills. Princer grips—moving the thumb and hand together—are very important. Movement of the thumb and forefinger together should be practiced. Toys and healthy finger food can be used to practice fine motor movement. Skills that utilize one part of the body are called unilateral movements. Holding a cup with one hand and using a pen with another is a good way to teach unilateral movement. Wrist rotation and extension are important to teach kids to turn knobs and handles. Extension and flexion of the finger and wrists are great way to encourage unilateral movements. Muscles working together that utilize both the right and left sides are bilateral movements—such as scrunching up your toes or bending your wrists at the same time. Hand strength can be taught to snap items together such a blocks, cubes, and other plastic equipment.

Functional skills can be taught in combination with gross motor skills such as running and movement. Feeding, dressing, toileting, and important life lessons that will transfer to a more independent life are great subjects. Using scissors, pens, and sewing can be taught first with hand-over-hand eye coordination and then moved to partial and fully independent practice. Hand-over-hand is also helpful to teach pre-writing skills.

Finger plays are a great way to integrate listening and vocal direction of fine motor skills. Finger plays can be taught with songs or made-up rhymes. I often use traditional holiday/children’s tunes along with the finger plays to teach basic life skills.

This is only a general group of ways you can integrate gross/fine motor ovement in your classroom. With plenty of opportunities for repetition and patience, you will see growth in your children’s lives.

Fit 4 Fun Adaptive Fitness

http://worknotes.com/IL/Chicago/Fit4FunKidsFitness/

Smith, Jodene Lynn. Activities for Gross Motor Development.Winchester, CA: Teacher Created Resources, 2005.

Smith, Jodene Lynn. Activities for Fine Motor Development.

Readiness for Motor Skills

Readiness for Motor Skills Motor skills are developed in different stages for various children. It is essential that each child learns the major movement activities in order to have a life-long appreciation of fitness. During early childhood, there should be an opportunity to work on walking, balancing, throwing, and catching. Children should have trial and error experiences as well as beginning drills and the integration of skills in specific sport games. Skills are learned by body through mind learning. Emphasis should be on imitation and games that cause children to assume proper movement patterns. Proper form must be shown through fun games and activities. If a child has not mastered a motor skill considered basic for his age, there must be some remediation in that area. Children should have an opportunity to systematically develop basic movement and perception skills. When the child arrives into intermediate elementary grades, there should be more emphasis on structured games and sports. In elementary grades, the fundamental skills are developed and there should be less focus on the specialization of skills until they reach the teens. If a child has the opportunity to learn motor skills in small sections step-by-step, it will ensure that they will have success in the future.

Developing Gross and Fine Motor Skills in Early Childhood

This is a series about fine and gross motor skills in early childhood. Children of all ability levels should have structured and unstructured experiences in motor skills. Early intervention and involvement of parent/school can develop positive experiences which can help students develop at a normal rate. This month is part one on what is motor skills.

First, what are motor skills? They are the large and small movements of the body such as lifting, pushing, pulling, and carrying. The body must effectively use mind/body connection and spatial awareness of their surroundings to the muscles and bones to develop fine and gross motor skills.

Frequent teaching, reteaching and imitation is important to a student has difficulty mastering motor skills. Body movement of large and small muscles and rhythm songs help in teaching motor skills. Teaching direction such as up, down, clock and counter-clock wise help develop motor planning. These skills are important in developing both gross and fine motor skills.

Gross Motor Skills for Early Childhood Development

Today is part two of the series on Motor Skills. Gross Motor Skills are the first motor movements in early childhood. They are the large movements of the body using the arms, legs, torso and feet. Sitting, catching, kicking, galloping, crawling, walking, running, jumping, are considered gross motor skills.

There are many activities that can develop gross motor skills. Balancing on beams, standing on dots, crawling and climbing develop coordination, control, laterality, and synchronize the right and left body sides. Other activities consist of students crawling, going over and under objects during relays and obstacles courses.

Hopping helps control body and balance. Students can hop around objects such a low boxes and cones, dots or stepping stones. Jumping develops overall gross motor skills and coordination. Students can also jump over objects, string, a line or beanbags. Students can kick balls, balloons of various sizes.

Running and walking are other great gross motor skills and can be done around an obstacle course or in a relay such as in and out of dots, hoops, tires, or lines. Skipping around objects in organized games teach direction and can be done to music with a variety of rhythms. Other gross motor movements include twisting, turning and bending. Gross motor skills prepare students for sports participation that can last a lifetime.

Fine Motor Skills for Early Childhood

Today is the third and final segment of the Motor Movement Series. Fine Motor Movements use the small muscles of the eyes, fingers, toes, wrists, lips and tongue. The small muscles work with both the large muscles to develop movement. They are often for used communication purposes, both functional and expressive, such as writing or typing text, manipulating tools or creating works of art. There is coordination of the eyes and hand, foot and eyes, and dexterity of each of the fingers to write, draw and type. Tactile and space awareness is also developed with fine motor practice.

Some activities used to teach writing include writing letters or numbers in sand, pudding, or shaving cream. Q-tips or cosmetic sponges with water writing on the chalkboard reinforce correct formation of text using water to erase letters. Toothbrushes on dry erase boards manipulate practice with downward and circular brushing movements erasing previously correct formed letters, numbers or words. Dry and wet pasta, beans and rice, other paper mediums, glitter, teach writing with correct placement on paper or cardboard.

Skills to encourage fine motor skills include rolling dough or putty into balls, or hiding objects inside the mixture. Tearing paper, cutting on pre-made lines and patterns teaches forming correct size and shape . Linking materials such as Legos, Unifix Cubes, lacing and stringing activities encourage hand-eye coordination and color patterning. Using pegs, stickers, and flipping cards teach placement of objects.

Cooking not only teaches fine motor but also life and math skills such as measuring with various types of materials, mixing, stirring and blending using different parts of the hands. Fine motor skills are important to integrate with multiple tasks such as brushing your teeth and combing your hair. Combining two or more fine motor skills is important in developing normally. Self-care skills are also important in developing fine motor abilities such as buttoning, lacing, fastening snaps in clothes, using simple tools, opening and closing drawers, jars and doors and cleaning the house including washing, and cleaning. These skills are necessary for life.

References:

Ask the Experts

What’s the difference between fine and gross motor skills?

http://www.babycenter.com/expert/baby/babydevelopment/6562.html

Developing Fine Motor Skills

http://members.tripod.com/~imaware/fmotor.html

Is my child normal?

http://www.wholefamily.com/aboutyourkids/child/normal/physical_development.html#fine_motor_development

Shirley’s Preschool Fine Motor Skills

http://www.shirleys-preschool-activities.com/fine-motor-skills.html

Shirley’s Preschool Gross Motor Skills

http://www.shirleys-preschool-activities.com/gross-motor-skills.html