Fun Activities For Classroom - Games to Improve Motor Skills

Fun Activities For Classroom

Evolution Game 

In the "Evolution Game" the idea is to help the child move up the "evolutionary" ladder with progressively more challenging motor activities. All these activities can be accompanied by music or made part of a copycat game. You can stage races or do it in and out and around things to make it more interesting.

• Slithering. This starts with slithering movements, like worms or reptiles. You begin by slithering along the ground together with the child. It could be a two-year-old toddler or even a fourteen month old playing copycat with you, or it could be a seven or eight year old slithering with music in the background. Slithering uses all parts of the body - arms, tummy, legs - in a coordinated fashion. Fun Activities For Classroom
• Crawling. From slithering the child moves to crawling on all fours. You can have crawling races and make it more interesting by doing it with music.
• "Wheelbarrow" Walking. In "wheelbarrow" walking you hold the child's legs while he walks on his hands. This, too, can be done as a race.
• Walking. Then we go to upright walking with nice, coordinated arm movements.
• Running, Skipping, Hopping, Jumping. Next, we go to running, skipping, and then hopping - whichever is easier for the child - and then to jumping. It is often easier to start jumping with both legs, then hopping on one leg at a time, and then skipping. Again, adult and child do it together to make it fun.

If the child is able to do some of these activities effortlessly, we can move up the "evolutionary" ladder very quickly. However, if the child has a hard time slithering or a hard time crawling, you can focus on that activity for a while.

• Agility Drills. Once we've gone up the ladder, through skipping and hopping and running, then, if the child is interested, we can do some more agility drills, sidestepping left and right, different dance steps, athletic steps, crossing legs over one another - adding variety to make it a little more interesting.

• Adding Rhythm. The next step will involve a little more rhythmic activity. We put on some music - some slow, methodical beats, some faster beats - and move rhythmically to the music. We usually do this at the level the child shows the highest level of competency. So if they are running, hopping, and skipping, we can run, hop, and skip in rhythm to the music. If they are just walking, then we will walk to the music and do some dances. But we have to march together or walk together or run together and do it rhythmically to the music.

Modulation Game 

After the Evolution Game comes what we call the "Modulation Game" in which we help the child do an activity faster and then slower and then superslow and then super-superslow and then from super-superslow back up to fast - again, at the highest level in which the child can show coordinated action.
 
The Modulation Game can be a copycat game in which you start with walking or moving, then with clapping hands, playing the drums (which could be the table or a bongo drum), or using our voices (making sounds or singing songs loud, soft, supersoft, back up to loud again). This activity is to help the child learn to regulate and modulate activity in all ways - with hands, legs, whole bodies, coordinated activities, voices, and so forth.
 
Again, most time is spent on those activities with which the child has the most difficulty. Some will have more difficulty with rhythmic activity or modulation, so you can put a little greater focus on that and use the other activities as just a warm-up. If the child is really competent at the preliminary exercises and seems to be getting bored, you can go right into the midlevel of the Evolution Game or the highest level of the Modulation Game.
 
Competition and Incentives. When introducing points and rewards for these games, the key is to make the child successful 70 to 80 percent of the time. In a competition, let children beat you 70 to 80 percent of the time so they stay encouraged. If you make it too hard, they will get frustrated and avoid the activity. Don't move on to a higher level until they are successful 70 to 80 percent of the time at the level you are working.
 
Body Awareness Games 

Once the child is comfortable walking, moving, running, and hopping and skipping, the "Body Awareness Game" brings in another facet of motor and sensory functioning:

• In, Out, Above, Below, and Through. The child moves in and out, above and below, and through physical objects in relationship to other moving bodies. You can use your hands or some physical structure you've created such as a little platform they have to crawl under or over or a tunnel they have to crawl through.
• Go Low and High, Go Left and Right. Then you can add moving hands or other objects (balloons, people, and so on), and the game is to avoid being touched while going through, under, around (left and right), and over objects. In this activity, children gain an awareness of where their bodies begin and where their bodies end. Fun Activities For Classroom
• Left and Right Sides of Body. Next are activities that integrate different parts of the body with sights and sounds: hand-eye, leg-eye, sound-leg, and sound-hand movement patterns. First you can do simple things like throwing a ball with both hands, then with one hand. Play Simon Says games or copycat games in which the child has to touch his left hand to his right shoulder, right hand to left shoulder, right hand to left knee, left hand to right knee and so forth to encourage this awareness. You can vary this in many ways, as long as the child is coordinating the left and right sides of his body, starting off using both hands, then one hand at a time in relation to the other side of the body. You can improvise and make it fun, letting the child win points for doing it right and lose points for doing it wrong. Little prizes for incentives work great with this activity. Again, if the child does this effortlessly, we don't need to spend a lot of time on such left-right types of games.
• Both Feet and Hands and Different Sides of the Body. These activities can progress to using both feet and hands and feet and hands on different sides of the body. Exercises can involve the upper part of the body and the lower part, such as bringing hands down to knees, or legs up to waist, and so forth. Such exercises can be found in Brain Gym: Simple Activities for Whole Brain Learning.
• Coordinating Hand-Eye, Hand-Leg, Sound-Eye, and Sound-Leg. Then you can move on to more elaborate coordination exercises. Playing catch can involve throwing and catching with both hands, then with the left hand, and then the right hand. Then a child can throw and try to catch the ball herself with her left hand, with her right hand, with both hands. This can be combined with kicking a soft rubber ball or a Nerf ball.
  

After simply throwing the ball back and forth and making It really easy, then you and the child throw it higher, with both hands, with one hand, the other hand, with both hands, then one hand, then the other hand. Then throw the ball into a basket and then move the basket so that the child has to throw the ball and anticipate where the basket will be as it is moving. Then we have the child first kick the ball to a fixed goal and then to a moving goal. Each time make little games out of it.
 
After completing the moving-goal game, you can move on to sound-hand and sound-leg exercises in which you keep changing direction for the child - "Kick it left, kick it right." You can have two goals and tell the child to kick it to the right goal and then the left goal, throw it to the basket on the right, throw it to the basket on the left, so it is not just sight and movement but sight, movement, and sound that the child is coordinating. Every time we get more parts of the nervous system working together, we are enhancing the ability to act in a focused way. To learn more, you can check out Fun Activities For Classroom.

Brain With ADD - Methods To Strengthen Weak Areas

Brain With ADD

As we go along further, you will see that we take the position that children do best when we consider them as individuals and understand their unique developmental profile, their strengths and weaknesses, particularly in these core abilities and, most important, to help them get to higher and higher levels of thinking. You will also see some of the methods and exercises we use to strengthen weak areas.
 

With such efforts we can help children get over the tendency to be sensory seeking or on the move all the time or help them master their overreactivity to certain sights and sounds. We can also help them to plan and sequence their actions more effectively and improve their basic bodily and motor skills - for example, their ability to take notes and write, using fine motor skills. We can help them not only become more coordinated but also carry out complex actions like in a ballet or a dance.
 
When we look at Stephanie, we have to ask whether Stephanie is characteristic of many children with ADHD. We have just completed a study of children who showed the symptoms of ADHD on all the checklists and met the criteria of ADHD in diagnostic manuals and other research checklist systems. We found that although their symptoms of inattention and high activity were often the same, each one had a slightly different way of taking in sensations, planning actions, sequencing, and so forth. Brain With ADD
 
They had different sensory profiles, different levels of thinking, different levels of self-awareness. We found that children with this common set of symptoms showed enormous varieties in the underlying pathways. This raises a question: Do we want to find the underlying causes and strengthen the core abilities, or do we want to focus on only the surface symptoms?
 
When we look at human beings, we can't look at just one function in isolation because they are all related. We can't look only at attention because it's related to motor development, sensor/reactions, thinking, and the role of emotions. We like to use the metaphor of a tree. The roots are the reasons for both healthy development and for the many different symptoms of ADHD, like challenges in the ability to take in what we see and hear, how we plan actions and react to sensations. The tree trunk is our thinking ability, how strong it is and how high it can grow. Then the branches and leaves are the various abilities, like reading, writing, math, science, and the many nonacademic abilities. This model for ADHD works very well. We want to strengthen the roots and the trunk.
 
Over a period of two years, Stephanie flowered with an approach that provided Stephanie's parents with fun exercises they could do every day that strengthened her core capacities. As Stephanie grew older, she also developed a skill that is vital for children and adults with ADHD. She became more self-aware. She learned to evaluate herself: "I don't need to be in a hurry" or "I'm paying attention better." She learned to reflect on her feelings: "I like Betty better than Harriet because Betty is more like me or our families are alike." In school this kind of reflective thinking was vital: "This wasn't a very good essay" or "I'm having a harder time listening today because of ..." If a child can learn to see the big picture, the child then has a framework in her mind that helps put problems into perspective. The ability to think reflectively allows children to fill in the pieces even if they don't hear everything the teacher says. This is an ability that is more important than just paying attention.
 
How many children make the progress we have seen in Stephanie? In my practice, I have found that if the vast majority of parents and schools and children cooperate, and even if it's only the parents and children, we see growth overall in focus and attention.
 
Organizing and Planning Actions 

As we discussed, children can have difficulty in paying attention for a wide variety of reasons, from being underreactive to sensations, to craving sensation, to being overreactive, to difficulties processing information and problems planning their actions. Most children with ADHD and ADD have some combination of these problems. A study is currently under way to document the variety of patterns that contribute to this one "common pathway": difficulty in paying attention and hyperactivity. In this post, we will examine one of these patterns, involving the motor system.
 
Weaknesses in motor skills, motor planning, and sequencing are frequently found in children with ADHD. Most require some level of work in each of these three areas. We can work with each child on all these areas simultaneously. The swiftness with which they master the exercises or games or playful activities in each will determine how much work we need to do. Brain With ADD
 
Motor Skills 

A child may have trouble with basic motor skills: being able to move left, right, forward, and backward, and doing so with growing dexterity and coordination. To help strengthen these skills for younger children, I like to recommend a series of activities starting with the Evolution Game, with wormlike or snakelike crawling or slithering on the ground, then moving on all fours, then different kinds of balancing on all fours, and then balancing in upright positions. After that we can work on children's ability to coordinate what they see and hear with how they move - left, right, forward, backward, according to different sights and sounds and doing it more quickly. Then we can begin to work on eye-hand coordination and foot-eye coordination, doing it to rhythm and music and with timing exercises. Fantasy play and pretending to be a bird or an action figure can make these games more fun for children. For older children, we can also use the Evolution Game, but sports and dance may be a more enjoyable way for them to learn to master movement patterns.
 

Motor skills are fundamental to paying attention. You have to have control over your body to be able to focus on any activity. Although some children with low muscle tone are able to concentrate very well and some children who have excellent motor skills might have trouble with concentration, work on these skills generally helps with attention problems. They are a very important foundation piece for general development and help most children learn to attend and focus better. To learn more, you can check out Brain With ADD.

Kid With ADD - Helping Children Overcome ADD

Kid With ADD

The story of Stephanie, an eight-year-old patient in our practice, illustrates our approach to ADHD and how we help children overcome the challenge of learning to pay attention. Her name and other identifying information have been changed.
 
Stephanie came to us because she was having difficulty with reading and math in school and because her teacher had labeled her as having ADHD. At school, she was active all the time, chitchatting with her friends and darting about the classroom. At home, Stephanie was also always on the move, getting into frequent conflicts with her sister, even becoming aggressive, which is unusual for a girl her age. Her teacher kept putting pressure on Stephanie's parents to see her as having ADHD and get her "medicated" to improve her focus and attention. Stephanie was in the second grade and heading into the third grade very shortly, and her parents were told she wouldn't be able to keep up with the work, given her "ADHD."
 

When I initially observed Stephanie in my office, I saw a spirited girl who came in with two motivated, conscientious, thoughtful parents. (Dad was an attorney, and Mom, who previously worked in public relations, stayed at home with Stephanie and her two younger siblings.) Stephanie was indeed active, and her curls bounced as she explored every corner of the office, getting up and down, fidgeting, and moving her arms and legs all the time. Not only was her activity level very high, but her thoughts shifted rapidly as well. When I observed Stephanie with her parents and individually, she would jump from topic to topic, from who was mean to her at school to what's behind the door in my office and then back to her friends and then to how she hated math, and so on. Even when I talked to Stephanie alone, it was hard for her to develop a topic. For example, when I asked her why she thought a certain friend was mean, she would say, "She's mean to everyone" or "I don't think she likes me," but then quickly jump to examine one of the toys and games in my office. When I watched Stephanie's parents with her, they tended to structure things to try to bring her back on topic, but without much success.
 
I suggested that Stephanie and her parents talk about what they might talk about at home so I could see the flavor of their relationship. Morn said Stephanie occasionally liked to help with cooking, so Morn opened up with "What do you want to help me cook today?" Stephanie, who loves sweets, smiled at her mother and said, "I want to make my favorite lemon pie." Kid With ADD

As we reviewed Stephanie's history, we saw that she had always had difficulties in certain areas ever since she was little. When she was a toddler, she flew about and explored everything. Her parents thought this was a sign of intellectual curiosity and potential. Indeed, Stephanie was a very bright little girl, but had difficulty remaining with an interest for more than a moment. Despite her constant activity, Stephanie showed a warm attachment to her parents and a lively range of feelings and humor in describing her "pesky" siblings.
 
Now with math in the second grade, Stephanie's problem wasn't in comprehension but in slowing down long enough to understand the methods behind solving the problems. She was very impatient and wanted to speed through things. She tried to finish so quickly that she often made mistakes.
 
Stephanie was called the family "whirlwind." She liked music and sports, and was an enthusiastic soccer player. She was well coordinated, but frequently didn't follow the rules because she was so eager and couldn't slow down. She had difficulty following directions, whether they were verbal, like giving her three or four clues in a treasure-hunt game or following directions at school, or visual clues, like reading a map with clues to how to find something. Her challenges seemed to be across the board.
 
Stephanie also showed some sensitivities, being overreactive to noises, particularly to high-pitched sounds. If music was in the higher frequencies, as in much popular music, she would get more active, move around more, and sometimes hold her ears. She also avoided certain types of touch, like smooth, silky things and foods that were slippery or "slushy."
 
When we evaluated Stephanie further, we found that even though she was good at sports, fine motor skills were difficult for her. Her handwriting was sloppy and hard to read, and when she took piano lessons she struggled to manage the fingering. She preferred to play the drums because she could pound away and move around more. Kid With ADD
 
In our discussions with Stephanie, we found that she was more of an all-or-nothing thinker rather than one who would look at subtle variations in what she heard or comprehended. In her preferences and friendships, Stephanie tended to go from one extreme to the other - she loves me, she hates me, rather than she likes me a little bit or not too much. This carried over to math concepts - that's tiny, rather than "bigger than this." Stephanie didn't have an internal feel for graduated amounts, whether it was emotions, math, or annoyances from her siblings.
 

Observing all these facets of a child's profile takes several sessions with both child and parents. In contrast to many approaches to diagnosis, which often consist of a parental or teacher report and session of observation, followed by a prescription, our approach takes in a number of evaluations, often involving more than one professional.

Rather than simply labeling Stephanie as having ADHD, we saw her as a child who had uneven growth in making sense out of different elements of her world and in regulating how she responded to sound, sight, and touch. She also had problems with how she planned her actions and thought. To learn more, you can check out Kid With ADD.