Meandering through Motor 'skills'

Where to start with this post?  First of all, this is not a comprehensive guide into motor skills, as the title suggests, it will be a meandering account of things we've tried/are trying with J.  We embarked on the wanderings in the knowledge that with strong gross motor skills, fine motor skills follow and with that the seemingly all important handwriting will emerge.  The trouble for us is that with J his gross motor skills, at 12, remain poor (although they have improved greatly and he has worked long, and hard, to master things.)  There is so much to say and cover that bite-sized posts may be the only way to go.   We have tried/employed/practised many, many, many items/programmes/techniques in the hope of finding out what works for J.

J has struggled all of his life with handedness (this was touched on in an earlier post - What about Writing)... he showed no preference as a youngster so, given his other difficulties, it was agreed to encourage him to use his right hand.  Now, this has made little difference.  Being brutally frank, he is the opposite of ambidextrous, that is he is equally poor with both hands!  We now know this is called being 'ambisinistrous'.
As said in the aforementioned earlier post, J has had access to all types of pens, grips, writing slopes, white boards, therapy putty, paints, brushes, gross and fine motor games and exercises.  All to very little avail.  However, the facts remain that he has little stamina, holds implements at odd angles, cannot align his physical output with his mind's eye picture of what he wants to deliver... so you can imagine the frustration he feels.  In the family, we call this his frustration gap and we try to encourage him to keep putting pen to paper with simple dot-to-dots, line games, letter formation games and so on.

Some of the pens we have in our arsenal of handwriting tempters... he tends towards those with fatter grips and that can be corrected.  So, the frixion pen was a real find - it writes like a roller ball yet rubs out like a pencil.  The Stabilo s'move range are brilliant for reminding him where his fingers need to be to hold the pen/pencil.  And the selection of felt tipped pens he has used is vast.

Over the years, although he has poor hand eye co-ordination J has adored Hama beads and is a still a keen beader.  There has been the odd disaster when his masterpiece hasn't made it to the ironing board for fusing before a tremor has jerked the beads all over the floor.  He loves telling the story of when he was trying to open a packet of beads (5000 of them) and was tugging at the packaging whilst saying "Mum, can you help me open - oooooops!"  and lo!, there were 5000 beads spread far and wide across the floor. Whoops.  We both had to laugh but my goodness they can't half travel.

Naturally, he's also been very much into Lego and Meccano and comes up with some massively complex creations.  All of which have added to his fine motor skills and co-ordination/planning.  He has a huge collection of Lego... dreams of the stuff and talks about 'improvements' to the current range of models he's working on.  Lego is great for him... he gets to express himself, can (usually) do all his Legoing by himself and the models are quite sturdy so withstand any unexpected tremors.  Of course, sometimes a 'disastrous' failure happens and it will require immediate re-building of the model 'just the way it was'. Meccano is a bit more structured, the instruction leaflets great for planning and the skill required to use the bolt/nuts in situ is one he's starting to master.

Work on gross motor skills happens throughout every day.  J will catch and throw (socks usually) and can even bounce a mid-sized ball and walk with it a few steps now.  He will jump off steps (only up to 4) to get feedback and 'ground' himself.  He balances on a gym ball or physio roll (peanut) when he watches television so he knows where his body is... He's on the move all the time. In summer he will bounce on the trampoline. He has a swing seat indoors and loves to use that to calm down - but it also lets him know where his 'bits and bobs' are.  More to follow on this in a later post...