Summer Paper Plate Kinesthetic Drawing Game

This Summer paper plate kinesthetic drawing game is super fun and easy for a group.  It encourages visual spatial skills, visual motor skills and body awareness.  It is a definite challenge for kinesthetic awareness.  Here is how you play:

Give each player a pencil and a non-coated, white paper plate.  If you do not have paper plates you could use recycled, light weight cardboard i.e. inside of a cereal box.

Each player should hold the paper plate on his/her own head and be ready to draw on it with the pencil.  You could also just play by having the children close their eyes and draw on regular paper.

Read these directions out loud for the players to follow:

1. Draw grass on the ground.
2. Draw the sun with rays in the sky.
3. Draw two flowers in the grass that are not touching.
4. Draw 2 birds in the sky under the sun.
5. Draw a ball in between the flowers.
6. Draw one cloud in the sky next to the sun.

Take the plate off of your head and look at your crazy drawing.  If you want to score the drawing give yourself points if you –

• Score 1 point if the sun is in the sky.
• Score 1 point if none of the sun’s rays overlap.
• Score 1 point if your flowers do not touch.
• Score 1 point if your flowers are in the grass.
• Score 2 points if your birds are under the sun.
• Score 1 point if your ball is in between the flowers.
• Score 1 point if your cloud is not touching any grass or flowers.

You can play this game with any theme.  The original idea I saw was a Christmas game.  Just create new directions and a new scoring system.

If you are looking for more kinesthetic awareness activities, check out Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

 

Now You See It, Now You Don’t includes 20 worksheets to practice kinesthetic skills without visual input. Some children rely too much on the visual system when completing visual motor activities. These worksheets encourage a child to use his/her kinesthetic sense (where the body is in space) to complete a visual motor task rather than relying on the visual system. The ebook includes 10 easier worksheets and 10 harder worksheets. The theme is animals and sports.  FIND OUT MORE.

The post Summer Paper Plate Kinesthetic Drawing Game appeared first on Your Therapy Source.

Teaching Handwriting to Students with Learning Disabilities

School based occupational therapists frequently evaluate and treat students with learning disabilities especially including handwriting difficulties in some districts.  Many school districts are moving away from handwriting instruction although students are still required to submit handwritten assignments.  Children with learning disabilities may have slow, illegible handwriting resulting in decreased written output.  Students in early elementary grades tend to have more issues with handwriting compared to the older grades.  The skill of handwriting includes postural stability, fine-motor movement, visual-motor coordination and orthographic coding (committing letter names, shape, and sequence to memory).  A problem solving approach to handwriting may help teachers to add in extra instructional time during the current busy schedules of today’s students.

Teaching Exceptional Children published suggestions for a problem solving approach to handwriting instruction for elementary students with learning disabilities.  (This problem solving approach is not necessarily limited to handwriting instruction and in general therapists tend to follow this approach for all functional skills.) Try following these steps to help teachers integrate handwriting instruction:

1. Problem Identification – Determine where the student is struggling by using informal observation, collecting recent writing samples, providing a writing prompt or perform a formal handwriting assessment.
2. Problem Analysis – Look critically at errors and try to determine if any patterns exist regarding letter formation, letter knowledge, speed or legibility.
3. Determine a Solution – The majority of successful handwriting interventions use a  model–lead–test instructional framework.  This framework means that the teacher provides the most support in the beginning then graduals reduces support as the student gains independence. During the modeling phase the teacher or therapist would show correct letter formation by following the appropriate sequence of steps to each
   letter and saying or writing a series of letters to show correct alphabet sequence.  Proceed to guided practice while monitoring progress and providing feedback.  Finally, the student would perform handwriting without any support.  Additional solutions may be needed as part of the solution such as visual cues for letter formation, memory retrieval activities, orthographic coding activities and fine motor skill activities.
4. Implementation and Monitoring – Once you determine what letters and solutions you will be using, implement evidence based strategies with consistency.    With regards to practice time, the evidence indicates that 15 minutes of daily handwriting can result in meaningful gains.  Monitor the end of each handwriting session with data collection such as Handwriting Rubrics.   Analyze the data to determine if you need add extra solutions,  repeat certain strategies or move forward to practice new skills.

Reference:    Shawn Datchuk. Teaching Handwriting to Elementary Students With Learning Disabilities: A Problem-Solving Approach
TEACHING Exceptional Children September/October 2015 48: 19-27, doi:10.1177/0040059915594782

Handwriting Stations includes the materials to create a handwriting station on a tri-fold or in a folder. The station includes proper letter formation for capital and lower case letters, correct posture, pencil grip, warm up exercises, letter reversals tips and self check sheet. In addition, there are 27 worksheets for the alphabet and number practice (Handwriting without Tears® style and Zaner-Bloser® style). This download is great for classroom use, therapy sessions or to send home with a student.  Find out more information.