My Obstacle Course: Engage, Encourage and Empower

A fun, structured, systematic way to work on your child's strengths and weaknesses at home!

My Obstacle Course Station Ideas

Plunger + Dive Rings = Summer Themed Ring Toss

This is an activity idea I got from the Recycling Occupational Therapist: (http://recyclingot.blogspot.com/2009/06/plunger-ring-stack-activity.html)

She had posted about using a plunger for ring stacking and when I was at Target, I found these dive rings in the dollar section (I also grabbed an inexpensive new plunger. 🙂 ). While the dive rings are meant to go into a pool, combined with a plunger, they make a fun, super inexpensive, summer themed ring tossing game! This is a great way to work on tossing, motor planning, and can be set up almost anywhere you have a flat surface to suction the plunger to!

Plunger
Dive rings from dollar section of Target
My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Dive Ring Toss
Rings tossed!

We will start as close as we need to get the idea of how to toss, how hard, etc. and move back slowly to build this skill. Finger placement, hand/wrist movement and timing the release of the ring are all necessary for this activity. Having just tried a game of horseshoes with him, which is similar, we will probably be standing pretty close for a while and that is okay! I want him to get a chance to experiment, see what happens when he tries different approaches and work on the motor planning of this as much as he needs. We did this in front of a couch and it worked well for stopping some of the more “enthusiastic” tosses :).

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

 

Exercise Ball Swimming

Andrew is a great swimmer! He always has enjoyed being in the water and loves diving down for things like dive sticks and rings. People are always amazed at how comfortable he is in the water and I was encouraged to sign him up for swimming lessons so that he could learn the strokes and be on the swim team. I was a little reluctant to do this but thought I’d give it a try. Well, it didn’t necessarily go the way I had hoped (not the first time and I’m positive it won’t be the last!). The whole experience was overwhelming due to the fact that swim team practice was held during his lesson time. He thought that the swim team swimmers were hysterical to watch, all of those arms and legs flapping wildly, the goggled faces bobbing up and down (I’m smirking just imagining what it must have looked like to him!) and he would swim over and get in front of them. This was not exactly the ideal situation and I decided not to waste any more money. We’ll try again of course, just in a more private setting next time.

While lessons didn’t go well, I did notice that his left arm did not come out of the water in the same way that his right arm did. When he swims, he tends to use his arms together in a “breaststroke” technique to get to the bottom of the pool as well as anywhere else he wants to go. I wanted to be able to work on this with him and give his arms some practice with different swim strokes. We are lucky to live somewhere warm and have access to pools, but it’s not always ideal and thought about using my exercise ball to work on this as part of My Obstacle Course. We did and it worked great!!

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Exercise Ball Swimming

For this station activity, all you need is an exercise ball, squishy couch cushions or stacked pillows and you are set.

He got on, placed his stomach/chest on the ball and we worked on bringing his arms up and around his ear while reaching forward. We counted and chanted, “Reach forward!”

Getting ready to work on some swim strokes.

Notice how he’s even able to put his head up and down like he will need to do in the pool.

Working to get that arm up and around his ear.
Bringing it around again.

I also used the ball to help him get comfortable with floating on his back, something he was not crazy about. I held him (just like I would in the water) with one hand under his neck and another under his thighs. The ball wiggles a little bit which is good because it mimics floating in water. I encouraged him to pretend he was looking up at the bright blue, sunny sky and would even ask him how many birds he saw.

I share this because I know many parents who want their children to swim and felt like this was a good, easy way to practice the “floaty” sensation feelings that go along with swimming as well as work on some strokes without getting wet!

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

 

 

Beach Ball Questions

June is here and I cannot believe it! Time flies when you’re having fun! I will be posting on some summer themed station activities to help make skill building and reinforcement a bit more fun.

I got this idea from a company called Clever Catch that makes inflatable balls for classroom use to work on math facts. The balls are preprogrammed with things like numbers and equations and when the student catches the ball, they have to say or do what their eye sees first. A great way to keep something like this a bit random and interactive.

I decided to make my own to work on a concept Andrew needed more practice with – questions. Super simple to make and only took about 2 minutes total.

I purchased a beach ball, blew it up and then wrote question words in each section.

Basic Inflatable Beach Ball
Questions written on beach ball
More questions

The idea is that the ball is passed back and forth and the person has to ask a question using the question word that is in front of them. This helps build both questioning and answering skills while also building gross motor skills and visual tracking. We were working on tossing and catching skills, but this could also be done rolling the ball back and forth with your feet touching to create a leg border.

Sample questions we’ve had:

  • What did you eat for lunch?
  • Who did you see at OT?
  • When is your birthday?
  • What is your favorite color?
  • Where is your favorite place to eat out?
  • Why do you like wearing pajamas?

Have fun with this! Take turns if your child is ready to ask questions, guiding them if they get stuck.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

 

Pretend Play – Theme Boxes

When I first set out to really work with Andrew, one of the things that I wanted to focus on was his pretend play skills. I thought about what preschools and kindergartens did to encourage children to pretend play and realized that they simply provide materials for children to experiment with and play with usually based on a given theme for the week.

I remember our school receiving several kits while I taught kindergarten and my students loved going to the stations that had those kits. There was one in particular that was a paleontologist kit which had a little sand bin with fossils, bones and eggs that you could bury and unearth using toothbrushes, paintbrushes. The children would put on safari type hats, khaki vests and for that short time, they were paleontologists! There were some children who preferred to just play with the dinosaur figures and that was okay. I knew that it would not be that easy or natural for Andrew but thought that there had to be some way to introduce and expose him to this sort of fun thing using a more strategic manner.

It happened to be right around his birthday when I was thinking about this so when family members asked what he wanted, I told them that instead of going out and buying another toy he wasn’t going to play with, I asked them to choose a theme, get creative by getting things that reinforced that theme so we could make pretend play more meaningful while making connections. This did not have to cost a lot of money and could not include anything that had an on/off switch. We got so many fabulous things ranging from books to costumes and everyone had so much fun knowing that they were doing something that would help him.

The themes I chose were: cook, firefighter, farm, space, dinosaurs, doctor, construction, grocery store, cars.

 

Chef Andrew cooking up some Chex cereal concoction. He was only willing to lick, not eat what we made but that was farther than we had ever gotten with something like that!

 

It was so great and I still have those boxes, adding books or toy figures to them if they go along with the theme.

In my mind, working on building pretend play skills has to begin with relating it to one’s own life. This is a bit more challenging when a child is only focused on themselves but having theme boxes at home is a great way to slowly build this awareness in a safe environment.

When introducing this with Andrew in My Obstacle Courses, I began by choosing a theme, looked at the contents of the box and picked one thing to introduce. This was as simple as matching up the big dinosaur with the little dinosaur, putting a tool on it’s name card, or pointing to the ladder on a fire truck. This may seem basic, and if it is for your child, make it more in line with what they can do, but I was starting where he was, building the foundation. I would start this way because it is not as intimidating as sitting there with a bunch of stuff that they don’t relate to, cannot name and don’t know the purpose of. They cannot know what they do not know (just like us, huh!) and some children need this kind of play introduced more strategically.

From there we progressed to concepts like animals learning how to make friends using social scripts. A hammer used to tap a nail (or a golf tee) into a piece of thick foam. Dried beans, rice and pasta can be poured into a large bowl and stirred to make a colorful “salad” or “soup.”

Scripting Play

I strongly encourage using scripts if your child struggles with “getting” pretend play. It made all the difference in the world for us. It removed lots of unnecessary words from my mouth before the play actually began, which can often overwhelm and confuse him. It made it official, after all, it was printed out on a sheet of paper! It also provided a logical sequence of activity.

Ex. Push the blue car up the ramp. Park the blue car in a parking space. Put the red car in the elevator. Make the elevator go down. The red car needs gas. The red car is ready to go!

That’s it! Nothing fancy required but it made a huge difference. This gave Andrew a schema for what to do with these items, how to use them and what all of the parts of the garage could do. I did add some pretend play talk and noises while he was moving the cars around to model this for him.

While it did not happen overnight, just last night we got to listen to him pretend play with a castle and some people. The queen had gotten “hurt” and he walked two knights over to get her, making them walk across the floor while saying, “Oh no, she’s hurt!” They got her and brought her back to the castle. Some of you may think this is not a big deal and others may feel like they’ll never get there (I was like you!) but I feel that any small step one can take to move toward a goal is a step worth trying and taking.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

 

Patriotic Pinwheel Blowing

Patriotic Pinwheel

You may have picked some of these up for your yard or bicycle this Memorial Day but did you also realize that you can use this patriotic yard decoration to help your child build oral motor skills?

Andrew had a lot of difficulty trying to figure out how to blow air out of his mouth so I was always on the lookout for ways to help him. I found this particular pinwheel at Michael’s and thought that I could have him blow it to make it spin, giving meaning and purpose to something he finds challenging, while incorporating something he loves, spinning!

When I used this as a My Obstacle Course station activity, I had him either blow the pinwheel a certain number of times or use a certain number of blows. I found that providing him with a straw helped significantly because it gave his mouth some structure. (We also used a straw to blow out birthday candles. Much more empowering for him to do it that way as opposed to having us do it for him.) This year, we will try it without the straw to continue building his oral motor skills.

Note: Try blowing the pinwheel before purchasing it because some of them would get stuck or were more difficult to get spinning, which would only cause frustration.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Velvet Coloring Pages

These are Velvet Coloring Books that I found in the dollar section of Target recently. (Andrew also got one yesterday from a friend at school as a birthday favor.)

Flowers
Cars
Jungle Animals

I have seen these many times before, I even remember coloring with them while I was growing up but picked them up because I thought they would be great for someone who struggles with fine motor skills of coloring. The velvet edges create a natural border around the space to be colored and since the velvet is black, any markings that go beyond the coloring space is not as noticeable.

This is something that I would incorporate into several different My Obstacle Courses knowing that coloring is not a preferred activity for Andrew but using this a little bit at a time, maybe one section at a time, to help build his coloring confidence. I have seen little glimpses of him wanting to color but also struggling with his thoughts that he’s not good at it.

To be completely honest with you, I don’t really care if he is a “good” colorer or not. What my intention with something like this is to give him an opportunity to practice this skill in a safe environment, allowing him to experiment and practice the coloring strokes without judgement or worry about what someone else might say or think. If it turns out to be something that he enjoys but just needed to build fine motor skills in order to do this, than great!

This thought process is not limited to coloring but is something I think is an important benefit of doing My Obstacle Courses with him at home. He gets opportunities to build strengths and weaknesses at the level he is ready for without the worry or pressure of judgement.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!