tOTal ability

Occupational therapy strategies for school success at home.

As September approaches, you and your child may be feeling anxious about the start of school. 

Does your child use a written or electronic agenda for school?  Agenda books and their technological counterparts and applications can help children of all ages (and their parents) learn to manage their time and school work, which can help decrease everyone’s anxiety.  Agendas can be used to help with priority, planning and pacing as well as fostering communication between home, school, parents and children.  Help your child use their agenda to organize themselves, manage their time, communicate with parents and teachers, take initiative, be responsible, exercise control over their daily life, make decisions and with all that develop their self-esteem.

Here are my top strategies for school success at home.

1.  Do homework in the same place every day.  The place needs to be free of all distractions!  It should offer a chair that allows your child to rest their feet on the floor (or a foot stool if necessary) and a writing surface that large enough and is also just above bent elbow height.

2.  Make homework a habit.  Do it at the same time every day.

3.  Use the agenda as a tool together and review the day’s, week’s and month’s homework plan.  Use it as a forum to introduce communication between you and your child about their day.

4.  Decide and do what is urgent first.  Then do what is important second.  Thirdly do whatever can be done so that you prevent it from becoming urgent!

5.  Review achievements and accomplishments each day as you and your child sit with their agenda and homework.  Reward successes and steps to success.  For example, check off completed tasks in the agenda.  Put stickers on written version.  Allow a certain number of checks or stickers to earn a larger reward that your child enjoys.

5.  Teach your child and then practice, practice, practice how to predict the amount of time homework tasks will take.  Make a guesstimate, then time the actual task and finally compare the two.

6.  Teach your child how to break down a task into smaller steps and record the steps with actions and deadlines as well as their completion to celebrate.

7.  Have a little fun first.  Occupational therapists promote movement breaks BEFORE homework, not afterwards.  And during when needed.  Help your child’s body and mind get organized and ready to work with 10 minutes of muscle work before sitting down at a their homework desk.

8.  In addition to movement before homework, snack before homework helps too!  A hungry child will find it hard to concentrate and learn.  Choose crunchy, chewy snacks and drinks that are thick like smoothies through a straw; all help with oral motor muscle work that add in an organizing effect on your child’s brain.

Going shopping for your child’s school bag?

Here are some occupational therapy tips to choose one that is the right for your child to prevent muscle or joint injury.  Occupational therapists know that carrying something with a bit of weight to it can be a great part of “heavy muscle work” and helps to calm and organize the nervous system, so much so that we often create heavy muscle work tasks for excited, nervous or anxious children to help them feel more settled.   Nonetheless, lifting and carrying too much weight can cause injury. 

Backpacks now come in all shapes and sizes, choose one that fits your child each year or that can be adjusted to fit your child, not one she or he will grow into. 

If your child consistently has extra items that don’t fit in his/her backpack, consider using a slightly larger bag that rolls on wheels, but also one that he/she can carry up steps if needed. 

Make certain that whatever is being packed is indeed essential and used that day. 

Choose a backpack with two back straps.  Wearing one that is slung over one shoulder can cause your child to lean.  Weight should always be equally distributed. Ensure the straps are wide; a minimum of two inches and well padded.  Adjust and tighten straps so that the backpack fits snugly. 

A backpack that hangs loosely can cause muscle strain. Additionally, a backpack that is padded along its back is helpful in protecting your child’s back. The top of the backpack should rest just below the top of your child’s shoulder blades. The bottom of the pack should rest in your child’s low back curve.  It should never rest more than four inches below your child’s waist (bellybutton).   

Waist straps and chest straps are additional features that can help your child balance his/her backpack load evenly. External compartments should be reserved for lighter items but can also help to distribute the load and organize frequently used items for easy access. 

A loaded backpack should not weigh more than 15% of your child’s weight.  That means if your child weighs 100lbs, his/her backpack should weigh less than 15lbs.   Choose a backpack that is made of a lightweight but durable material to help reduce the overall weight your child must carry. 

Heavy items should be packed in the main compartment, at the bottom of the backpack and closest to your child when wearing the backpack.  Try to arrange items so they don’t slide around.

There are many steps to developing scissor skills. 

Does your child show an interest in scissors and cutting?  And not just cutting his/her sibling’s hair!   There are many activities to engage your child in pre-scissor skills that will help. 

Some occupational therapy favourites are: 

Play with salad tongs or kitchen tongs to pick up and move small objects or food.Punch holes with a hand-held hole punch. This is a great way to make home-made confetti.

Suck up water with a turkey baster or small syringe.  Use colored water. Transfer the water from container to container.In the winter, spray colored water into the snow with a small spray bottle

Use large plastic tweezers to pick up cotton balls, foam noodles, play-doh balls, pom-poms, and so on. 

You can help your child learn to open and close scissors in a controlled manner by snipping string, yarn, or straws as part of a larger art project. Then progress to cutting short random snips.  Let your child practice snipping and cutting without following a line or guide first.  Make strips of paper, start with a 1/2” width and have your child cut across it with one snip.  This too can be part of a larger art project or simply just fun cutting up paper! 

Another occupational therapy favourite is having the child first place stickers on the strip at various intervals and then cutting the strips between stickers.  Subsequently increase the width of the paper gradually from one inch to a full paper width. 

You can then introduce a guide to follow.  It may be easier to first glue two popsicle sticks several inches apart to cut in between or you can also used something like waxed string or even colored glue to make the guide lines.  The raised surface provides a nice extra cue.  You can switch to cutting between two lines you make with a marker to slowly decrease the space in between until your child is cutting along a single thick line. 

Keep up the practice, progressing through cutting simple geometric shapes such as a square, rectangle, triangle, semi-circle then circle to cutting simple figure shapes such as the outline of a tree and finally cutting complex shapes like a star. 

Top occupational therapy reminders:

Thumb in top loop “thumbs up!”

Loops closer to finger tips than to knuckles – wrap loops with tape if needed to prevent scissors from sliding up fingers.

Index finger free of loop (loop should rest on index finger)

Bent elbows at sides “sticky elbows”.  Paint elbows with magic invisible glue so they stick to kids' sides.

Other hand is “helper” hand, holding the paper or object to cut. 

Cutting is a two-handed activitiy!

Small scissors for small hands. 

Learning to cut with too big scissors is a frustrating experience for all.

Left-handed scissors for left handers. 

Many popular scissors proclaim they are “right and left” handed.  They are not!  Their blades are not reversed for left-handers and the line to cut will be blocked.  Ensure your truly left-handed child, has left-handed scissors with the blades reversed. 

Street Safety Tips from Occupational Therapy 

School is out and outdoor play hopefully increases for your family, in particular after my last article!  Learning to stay and play within safe is an important lesson for all children and can be fun when it includes creative ways for your child to understand and practice safety. 

Walk around your property with your child and show them where they can and cannot play.  Make large red stop signs and green go signs to place around the yard and driveway to designate stay and play safe places.  Or use sports cones to provide additional visual reminders of “out of bounds".  Make a visual map of your house, property and neighbourhood.  This can be in 2D or a rainy day 3D project!  Make it a colouring project to identify safe and unsafe spaces to play.   

Have a treasure hunt in the house, the yard and the neighbourhood.  Make sure you do place some items outside the safe play boundaries to help teach the importance of staying and playing safe no matter what the temptation.  Create a family story to read or a play to act out with a cast of your child, family, friends, neighbours and community helpers about safe play at home, in homes, in yards and in your town. Remember that from a child’s viewpoint, sidewalks are not all the same. 

Find opportunities to teach your child about sidewalk safety.  Make it a game with rewards to stay on the sidewalk. Set your own rules based on your child's age, development and abilities as to whether they must hold hands or not when crossing a street or walking in a parking lot. What does "left, right, left" mean to your child?  While often taught, is it meaningless to your child? Does your child understand that they aren’t simply looking left, right, left BUT checking to see that the street is clear before crossing? And what does “clear” mean?  That means clear of trucks, cars, vans, motorcycles or bicycles!  Teach your child to look, see AND listen too for traffic too.   Children also need to know that not all driver’s follow the rules of the road, even at crosswalks.  A vehicle slowing down does not mean it is stopping until it has stopped.  Making eye contact with drivers is also a great safety strategy to teach. 

Children often enjoy learning what street signs mean.  This is a fun back seat game on long or short drives.  And a great way to keep up reading skills over the summer months.  Does your child understand the purpose of stop lights?  What do yellow, green and red mean for vehicles and for pedestrians?  What happens at a cross walk for both vehicles and pedestrians? Practice street and yard safety as part of pretend play with toy people, vehicles, neighbourhoods and traffic signs.  Buy toys and books in these themes or get creative make your own.   

Be street safe for a great summer of outdoor fun. 

Get your family moving this summer:  strategies from occupational therapy!

Take advantage of warmer summer weather to just get moving.  Did you know that play is the primary “occupation” of children?  Play is best when it includes movement.  Play is important for all areas of a child’s learning and development; that includes not only physical health but also mental health, social skills, fine and gross motor skills and academic skills. 

Do active play and play time compete with “screen time” in your household?  Remember that screen time includes television, video games, computers, cellular phones and any size screen.

Occupational therapists help increase and improve that all-important primary occupation of play with children.  Occupational therapists look at three things when we help children, the abilities of your child, their actual occupations or activities and their environment.  Here are some OT ideas to help make positive changes in all three areas to get your child and you family moving this summer.

Do you participate in physical activity with your child?  Does your child see you engaging in regular exercise? Are you a good role model to get moving? Does your child join you on their bike when you go for a run or walk?  Does your family play together regularly?  Five minutes of tag in the backyard counts!  A good family goal is to reduce daily screen time by 30 minutes a day and replace it with 30 minutes of physical activity.

What are your child’s favourite physical activities?  What are new physical activities your child would like to try?  Does your child have daily opportunities to engage in physical play?  Organized sports can be a great part of regular physical activity...but so can a daily walk or bike ride to the mailbox to collect the mail (a great “job” and responsibility for your child).

Use a pedometer to help your child measure his/her steps each day.  Make daily step-count a family challenge.  What’s the prize?  A new game for the backyard? 

Does your child have inside space to move?  A space and place that is safe from breakables?  Do you have toys and games outside to entice your child to play with?  Does your child know how to play with them?

Don’t remove physical activity as a punishment.  So for example, instead of saying “You are too excited, you have to stop playing and go to your room” (where there is lots of screen time available) try a “movement-out” break like 10 jumping jacks, 10 sit-ups and 10 wall-push ups before returning to the game.

Right after meals is a great time to get moving.  A clean-up song with dance, can make doing the dishes fun.  Movement BEFORE homework is also a wonderful way to get ready to work.  Set a limit with a timer, like 10 minutes of physical activity just before homework.  Your child will be more alert, have improved concentration and attention and get homework done faster.

Get moving...and have some healthy fun!