This term our school is trialling a fine motor program to students from Years 1-6. In consultation with Occupational Therapists and Mr Ferguson, Miss Smith, one of our valuable Classroom Support Assistants has been working with children from Monday to Wedneday for 15-20mins to develop this important part of our bodies. 

Over the past couple of weeks students have attended daily fine motor sessions with a focus on improving hand and finger strength, dexterity, range of movement and control through a variety of activities. Our focus goal is to assist students to work on correct pencil grip, improve our handwriting and scissor skills for the classroom.

Some activities we have completed over the past two weeks include hand and finger warmups, putty exercises, tracing and copying pre-handwriting lines, folding and origami craft, manipulation, shaping and applying pressure to a range of materials to create student’s names and letters of the alphabet and participating in tweezing and moving variety of materials with different tools.

Some challenges last week included the feed the farm animal tong and tweezer grab, spinning top challenge and locating and removing hidden treasures in our Theraputty through squeezing and manipulation. In the coming weeks we will add different types of activities and challenges to our fine motor rotations and work with a larger variety of materials throughout these sessions.

We have Occupational Therapists to work with some students via Kurrajong and the Royal Far West on a weekly/fortnightly basis. These allied health professionals normally work 1:1 with our students and their families. This new program supports small groups of children over a number of days each week. It is hoped to roll the program across a different intake of children at a later date. If you have any questions or comments about this new initiative, please direct them to Mr Ferguson.
(Craig.Ferguson@cg.catholic.edu.au)