My schooling in the area of Occupational Therapy is coming in handy. I have always been aware that Jack has been less than neat in his writing and pretty careless and lacking in interest when it came to many fine motor tasks. It was like pulling teeth trying to get him to color a picture or simply write a letter when he was a bit younger. Now that he has had a decent amount of exposure to letters, writing, and art projects requiring fine motor tasks, he is willing to take a little time to do them now. His kindergarten teacher commented in the beginning of the year how he would do pretty much all he could to side step fine motor tasks like cutting and detailed picture coloring. We have discussed it various times over the school year, and she brought up an interesting point, which I think has some validity. She questioned his vision- and when he got his glasses. (He was 3 when he got them) and together we hypothesized that perhaps his lack of vision when he was young discouraged his exploration of fine motor tasks simply because it was hard for him to see what he was doing. Would you want to do something if you couldn't see what you were doing, and it was really hard? It honestly make a lot of sense in explaining a lot of the "behaviors" we have seen. Long story short, there is a good chance that his slight delay in fine motor coordination today likely is due in part to the vision deficit he had when very young.
With summer upon us, I felt is was important for me to be proactive this summer to avoid losing the skills he has, and to hopefully practice and improve upon them as well. He has surprisingly taken well to this idea and is so far cooperating nicely. We are going to have a chart with goals for reading and fine motor tasks for each week and there will be a prize (like a McDonald's cone) for completing his tasks each week. It is kinda neat to be able to use some skills I learned in school. I think we are going to try our cutting skills out on the grass and dandelions soon. An activity incorporating hand-eye coordination, bilateral hand skills, finger and hand strengthening, and fun all wrapped up in one:)
