Support to help your child with everyday functional activities
It is important to allow your child time to learn new skills so that they become able to care for themselves.
Try to remember:
- Don’t give too many instructions
- Everyday opportunities to practice
- Practice without time restraints- weekends and evenings
- Break tasks down to small steps, attempt each step in order and don’t rush them.
- Show, tell, allow to practice, encourage to self correct ‘do you think that looks right?’ rather than correcting for them.
- Use positive language and praise for efforts
Many of the everyday activities we support children to become independent in involve ability in the following areas of development:
- Balance – ability to distribute weight in a way that lets you stand or move without falling or recover yourself if you trip.
- Fine motor – refined movements and actions of the hand, finger, and wrist. This enables finger strength and dexterity of movement (ability to move fingers in the way need to perform task).
- In hand manipulation – ability to manipulate objects within the hand, e.g. move buttons
- Gross motor; Childs ability to conduct large movements required in everyday tasks such as
- Bilateral co-ordination; essential for co-ordination and fluid movements that require both sides of the body to work together to achieve a task. E.g. using two hands to use cutlery. Without these co-ordination skills children can appear clumsy in everyday activities or use only one hand during activities.
- Ability to cross midline; refers to moving the body (hand, arm, foot or leg) across an imaginary line the runs vertically down the centre of the body, to the other side of the body. Additional it refers to twisting in rotation around the line. This development is essential to many everyday functional tasks.