My six year-old girl constantly drops things. Part of it might be inattention to what she’s doing (Oh, look - pretty!) but it happens too often for it to be purely a lack of attention - she even will drop things that she’s interested in and currently looking at.
Her kindergarten teacher says that Sophie isn’t the most athletic child*, though she loves to run and play and kick balls around in the gym at the schools after-care program. But this dropping of things is getting to be a bit much and I’m interested in ways to teach her better grasping coordination and improving her strength in her hands.
Any of y’all have this problem with your young kids (or as a youngster yourself)? What did you do to solve it?
*Neither were her parents, so, again, paternity and maternity is evident.
Have you tried modeling clay (as opposed to PlayDoh)? My Occupational Therapist friend tells me that that is one of the best ways to develop this set of skills. (Best as in, it is effective and kids don’t mind doing it—and that’s an opinion, not something I have a cite for).
Squishy balls are good - the gel filled kind. Make it a squeeze-n-toss kind of game.
Jacks. Remember those? Bounce the ball, pick up weird little metal bits. Not so much for strength, but for coordination.
While I’m sure there are dozens of tools and toys made by occupational and physical therapists for this sort of thing, I prefer the kind of “therapy” that also teaches life skills or involves things you already have and do around the house. In that spirit:
Helping knead bread dough, mix meatloaf or form meatballs for dinner. Just teach her to wash her hands first.
Painting - grasping and using a paintbrush uses different muscle groups than writing or coloring.
Washing dishes, especially if you have something like Corelle that won’t break easily. Learning to control wet slippery dishes takes a lot of hand coordination and strength.
Woodshop. Are you handy with tools? I bet she’d love to build a…oh…bookshelf or dollhouse or desk or treehouse or treasure chest with you. Make sure there are lots of holes that need drilling and screws or bolts that need tightening. When you’re done with it, see above re: painting.
Does this manifest itself in other areas, such as handwriting? Perhaps an occupational therapist could evaluate her and make some suggestions. My friends whose kids have done OT swear by it.
I don’t know about handwriting - to be honest, at six her handwriting is already better than daddy’s at any age! I have always it difficult to hold a pen/pencil for any long period of time before my hand starts to hurt, so I learned to type (thank GOD for computers!) as soon as I could.
I had a similar problem, coupled with some balance issues. My mother got me some small bouncy plastic balls, and had me do a playground game three times each day. The sequence goes.
Throw the ball seven times at the wall and catch it when it bounces back.
Throw the ball six times at the wall and let it bounce of the floor before you catch it.
Throw the ball five times at the floor, and catch it after it bounces off the wall.
Put your non-dominant hand on the wall, reach under it with your dominant hand holding the ball, and throw it over the outstretched hand, catching it with your dominant hand.
Throw the ball three times at the wall, and every time clap once before catching it.
Throw the ball two times at the wall, and clap twice before catching it each time.
Throw the ball once at the wall, and spin around before catching it.
The girls used to play this among ourselves at school, the first one to complete the last step wothout fumbling was the winner. I got to good to play after a year or so.
I have to tell you, Septima, that game sounds awesome even if she wasn’t having problems.
Modeling clay might not get her mothers approval. WhyNot - mom’s kind of a neat freak. And so is Sophie, come to think about it. But Jacks… an idea so simple it never would have occurred to me.
I would second the jacks idea. Also, cats cradle (the game you play with string). It teaches you how to hold tension in your hands, as well manipulate your fingers and practice visual-spatial skills. You can find books on it if you don’t know to do it. It’s a great way to kill time (at airports, doctors offices, etc.) and requires minimal packing - just string! You can also reinforce finger dexterity/strength when you teach her to hold a fork and knife properly (with index fingers on the shaft of the utensil). Oh, and you could make sure she uses a mature grip when holding a pencil - immature grips tend to tire out your writing hand more. You can read more about mature/immature grips here: http://otility.com/articles/pencil-grasp-patterns.aspx
Hmm. Is there any way you can shoo Mom out of the house for an afternoon to create a “messy zone” with lots of Dad supervision and newspapers set down beforehand and good clean up afterwards? I wonder if part of her problem is just that she hasn’t had enough experience with the messy stuff in life. They don’t have time for stuff like modeling clay and paints much in school anymore, and if Mom’s been steering her to “neat” hobbies for 6 years, she might be showing some signs of weakness just because she’s not been practicing with those muscles, not because of an inherent delay.
You can also find paints called Elmer’s Go Paints (and Crayola may have an equivalent) that only paint on special paper. I didn’t believe it at first, but it’s actually true! The paint is inside the brushes. For little little kids, I think they’re a lousy idea, because they essentially mean you don’t have to supervise them and they never learn self-control with them. But she’s old enough to have learned paint doesn’t go on walls already, so if they’d make Mom relax, it might be worth it.
Even a marker can use different muscles if you just put the paper vertical, like on an easel or magneted to the fridge.
Oh. Oh dear. Sounds like my inlaws. The good news is they raised one son who went on to play football at Notre Dame. The bad news is they also raised my husband, who can trip over dust and has handwriting not even he can read.
I had eye/hand cooridination problems when I was little. Our doctor told my mom to buy some small nuts and bolts and have me screw the nut on and off. My coordination improved a lot.
String figures. Origami. Crochet if you can be sure she’s not going to poke herself in the eye or the like.
Those are some of the things I did as a youngun. Unfortunately I can’t help too much because I was already using sign language which requires some coordination. (don’t ask how good I do at ball catching though, I’m terrible :D)
My six-year-old has similar issues (among others), and his OT and I have used toys like pick-up sticks, Tinker Toys, Legos, etc. to improve his fine motor skills. Modeling clay is an excellent recommendation for improving hand strength, and I’ve seen a new, non-messy version, but I can’t recall the name. I’ll ask his teacher what that stuff is.
I also get him involved in cooking. Mixing cookie dough builds strength. Measuring ingredients helps with fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.
This may be way out in left field, but have you had her eyes checked? I had hideous hand-eye coordination as a kid, and was quite clumsy - eventually my parents realized that my eyesight was terrible, and that was causing problems that seemed like motor control problems. I never complained of not being able to read the board, etc, because how I saw was normal to me, but when I got glasses it was a huge revelation.
The clumsiness never really went away, but I like to believe that if I had been tested at a younger age it might have. Who knows?
This is exactly my experience. I learned to read early – heck I could SEE a book. A softball? Not so much. However, if the issue is objects she’s holding in her hand, I kind of doubt it’s because she’s not seeing them clearly.
Just make sure you don’t approach it as “now it’s time for your hand exercises,” just that this is a neat game. It will be doubly so if you play it with her.
Heh, when I was a kid I probably should have had glasses from about the age of 7 or 8, but I didn’t want to wear them so I hid my nearsightedness. When they had the eye screening days at school, I placed myself at the end of the line and listened to everyone else read the chart so I could memorize it. If I needed to read the blackboard but I was sitting too far away, I made a pinhole camera by using a pencil to drill a hole through one of those big pink erasers. If I didn’t have an eraser on hand, I could make a “pinhole” by holding my fingers a certain way. Yeah, I looked stupid holding an eraser or my empty hand up to my eye, but I really didn’t want those glasses. I finally got a pair when I was in 5th grade; only then did I realize how much of the world I was missing.
Anyway, the point of all this is that you might consider dragging your kid off to get a proper eye exam if you have even the slightest reason to think she might not have 20/20 vision.
I’ll second the crochet and Lego/Tinker Toy/Lincoln Logs building sets. Sometimes I’ll get a crocheting or knitting mania, and then I realize that my hands and wrists ache. It’s a lot of fun, though, and it does help my arthritis.
How about having her mix up a pitcher of Kool-Aid or something similar every night for dinner? That should be within her abilities, and will give her practice in mixing and measuring. She’ll probably enjoy doing it, too, especially if she gets to pick the flavor.
I think the bigger issue you seem to be missing is that you are obviously married to a serial killer.
Good suggestions all - I will start trying them at home. My youngest has some coordination problems. His kindergarten teacher has recommended OT. We have joked that the poor boy would find a way to run head first into the only tree in the middle of a two acre field.
I wonder if part of her problem is just that she hasn’t had enough experience with the messy stuff in life. They don’t have time for stuff like modeling clay and paints much in school anymore, and if Mom’s been steering her to “neat” hobbies for 6 years, she might be showing some signs of weakness just because she’s not been practicing with those muscles, not because of an inherent delay.