Therapist Thursday….Birds are made to fly! Kids are made to move!

by: Michelle Yoder

Birds are made to fly and kids are made to move!  Action is meaningful and exciting for children!  In our experience as OTs, we have found that making fun noises while writing is much more fun and engaging for the children.  Therefore, we use action words to describe our strokes.  It is much more exciting to “zip” down rather than just write a straight, vertical line.  So, for any vertical or horizontal line, we use the action word, “zip”.  We use the action word, “zoom” to describe diagonal lines. “Buzz” describes any curved stroke.  “Hop to the top” moves the pencil from the bottom baseline back to the top, to avoid re-tracing, which makes their work look messy and illegible.  Once you and your children have an understanding of these action words, it will allow consistent formation of all letters.

 Have your child draw a B in the air while saying these action words.  “Zip down, hop to the top, buzz around, buzz around”.  Now, put the pencil to the paper and do the same thing!  You’ve got it!

 Green means go!  To increase accuracy and legibility, we use a green line at the top to facilitate top to bottom formation.  Every child knows that red means Stop! Once they reach the bottom baseline, the red line indicates that it is time to stop.  We provide these cues in both the boxes and three lines on our paper, on our magnetic and dry erase boards and muscle mover gross motor cards to foster carryover and ensure accurate formation.

 Why do we use the three-lined paper with the middle dotted line?  Great question!  We’ll answer that next Thursday!

Teacher Tuesday….Fun Summer Activities

by: Cherie DuPuySummer is upon us and that means school is almost out!  Today we are providing you with FUN activities to keep your children occupied during those long, hot days. The following activities may seem like playing to you or your child, but each activity is working on those little fingers,hands, and bodies to keep them in shape for school!
Big Ice Cube Awesomeness

What you’ll need:

large

Tupperware

water

trinkets to put in water

food coloring

Directions:

1. Fill Tupperware with water.

2. Place trinkets in the water.

3. Add food coloring then cover.

4. Place Tupperware in freezer.

5. When frozen, pop out and let your children go to town chipping away with child friendly tools.

Tweezing Sunflower Seeds

What you’ll need:

Tweezers

A sunflower

Directions:

1. Use tweezers to pluck seeds from a sunflower.

2. Then toast the seeds and eat them for a snack

.DIY Bean Bag Toss

What you’ll need:

Plastic bowls

Bean bags

Index cards

Tape

Directions:

1. Label each bowl with a number.  This is how many points the children will get if the beanbag lands in that bowl.

2. Place the bowls in a straight line.

3. Have the children try and toss the beanbag into the bowls.  This can also be a little math lesson as well as they try to add up their own points from their tosses.

Homemade Ring Toss game

What you’ll need:

paper

plates

paint

scissors

long cardboard tube (from cling wrap, paper towel etc…)tape

Directions:

1. Cut the center from some paper plates to use as your ‘rings’.

2. To make the stand just cut slits in the bottom of the cardboard tube and flatten the ends, then tape it to the reverse side of a plate so it will stand.

3. Let the rings fly!

Teacher Tuesday……DI for the Little Guy

by: Cherie DuPuy

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an SDE conference in Charlotte, N.C. The speaker was the energetic and entertaining, Kim Adsit.  Being a teacher, I am always looking for new and creative ways to make the classroom run smoother and Kim gave me a lot of fresh ideas.  I thought I would share a two ideas with you today.

Assessments:

As the end of the year quickly approaches, assessments are on everyone’s minds. Kim’s way of tackling assessments is to sit down at the beginning of the year and split up all the standards.  Each week, she would cover 2 math and 2 literacy standards.  Then when the end of the year approached, she wasn’t feeling the crunch because she had been assessing throughout the year.  These ongoing assessments also helped her know who needed to be retaught the lesson through small group.

Monday journals:

This is a great way to show progress throughout the year.  When conference time comes, you can pull out the journals and show the growth the child has made.  For the child that is at or above grade level, have the next grade’s writing rubric there to show the parent what you will be working on with them.

I really enjoyed hearing Kim speak and she energized me as the end of the year approaches.  If Kim comes anywhere near you, and you are a pre-K thru 1st grade teacher, I highly recommend taking her class.  You won’t regret it!

Find out more about Kim’s conferences at www.SDE.com and her ideas at kindergargalkim on Pinterest.

Muscle Mover Monday….lowercase d

Dive like a dolphin.

Therapist Thursday….Teacher Ideas

In celebration of National Teacher Appreciation Week, today’s Therapist Thursday is devoted to unique places teachers can let students practice handwriting.  Each place will help foster the correct pencil grip to enable students more success with handwriting.

Fun places to write:

1- vertical surfaces

2- Easels or Chalkboards

3- Butcher Paper or Gift Wrap taped to a wall

4-  Windows

 

Muscle Mover Monday…lowercase a

slide like an alligator

Muscle Mover Monday…lowercase c

cluck like a chicken

Therapist Thursday….Fun Finds at the Dollar Store

by: Amy Bumgarner

Fundanoodle has so many great products for development of fine and visual motor skills in preparation for handwriting!  Here are some fun ways to add to those products, just by shopping at the dollar store!

The I Can Bead, Lace, Rip, Trace kit helps the child develop the pincer and tripod grasp in preparation for writing.  Ice cube trays are great for sorting, and they work on isolation of the pincer fingers too!   When putting in or taking objects out of an ice cube tray, the child is forced to use this fingers as well.

Just as ice cube trays help strengthening a child’s grasp, so do tongs.  Tongs are fun for sorting cotton balls, small trinkets, or colored candy!

In the upper and lower case muscle mover cards, various actions are paired with each letter.  Each of these actions has a specific purpose for activation and organization of the nervous system.  Whistling and blowing are some of the including activities. These are great oral motor activities, and are very calming the nervous system.  You can add some whistles or bubbles with the muscle mover cards for some extra fun!

     

Muscle Mover Earth Day Monday….lowercase o

Hang like an orangutan.

In honor of Earth Day we are going to discuss a few facts about orangutans, a cousin of our Max the monkey!

1.  Orangutans are native to Indonesia.

2.  Orangutans are born with an ability to reason and think.

3.  This large, gentle red ape is one of humankind’s closest relatives, sharing 97% of the same DNA

4.  Orangutans are unique in the ape world. There are four kinds of great apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans. Only the orangutan comes from Asia; the others all come from Africa.

5.  They make their home in these trees and build nests each night out of leaves and branches in the very tops of the trees.

6.  Almost all of the food they eat grows in the treetops and the frequent rains fill the leaves thus supplying their drinking water.

7.  An orangutan’s lifespan is about 35-40 years in the wild, and sometimes into the 50’s in captivity.

8.  Orangutan females only give birth about once every 8 years – the longest time between births of any mammal on earth

9.  Their diet is made up of bark, leaves, flowers, a variety of insects, and most importantly, over 300 kinds of fruit.

10.  As of 2012, the Orangutan Conservancy believes there are approximately only 40,000 orangutans remaining in Borneo and Sumatra. Shockingly, the number was about 60,000 as recent as a decade ago

More information can be found at: http://www.orangutan.com/

Muscle Mover Monday….lowercase t

Rock like a turtle.