Fine Motor Skills Blog Series #2: Why you should be involved

In recent years therapists are noting an increase in fine motor skill delay. This is manifesting itself in schools as children with poor academics, negative behaviors in classrooms and avoidance of paperwork such as homework and in classroom activities.

As an occupational therapist, I see children who have already been negatively affected by a lack of fine motor skills. In my clinical practice, I see mainly 8 to 11 year old boys who can not hold a pencil properly, who have difficulty printing due to letter formation, spacing and neatness. Often, these children have no diagnosis and therefore are not red flagged and "fall through the cracks". Often, it is the parent who determines that there is an issue and does research to find out that their child's fine motor skills may be the problem.

I finally got frustrated enough at not being able to get this message out that I developed a 1 day course for teachers, teaching assistants, parents and allied health professionals to teach them what they needed to know about fine motor skills. My course is called HandWorks: Fine Motor Skills Training.

Getting Fine Motor Skills Training to the masses
After developing this course and delivering it within my region I realized that this issue was bigger than I thought. The feedback from participants was excellent and they wanted more and continued to say that this should be general knowledge for anyone working with children. That's when I decided to put this training online......and what a project this has been. The good news is that fine motor skills training will be available on line soon through http://www.finemotorskillsforchildren.com/ . Keep an eye out for our launch October end 2009.

Karey