Hand-Eye Coordination
Here are two activities you can try at home to help your child associate eye movement and arm and hand movement. They will in no way replace the work of a psychometrist (who will know exactly how to teach your child how to place his fingers properly for instance), but they will add up to the exercises that your child will be most likely presented with.
Stringing Beads
In order to work on eye-hand coordination, our psychometrist asks Matthieu to string large beads on a thick thread. Younger children will not be asked to string them in a particular order, but older children can be asked to follow threading patterns.
Alex Toys – Wash and Strong Wooden Stringing Set
Kaplan – Infant Library Baby Beads
Earlyears – Lace-a-Shape
Bead Bazaar Lacing Kit – Lowercase Alphabet
Maple Landmark – String a Lace Jumbo Beads
Learning Resources – Smart Snacks ABC Lacing Sweets
Using Stickers
Plain stickers offer a wide range of possibilities:
- Learn how to peel them off and then stick them on a piece of paper (not missing it)
- Learn how not to stick them all together in a pile, using the whole piece of paper
- Try to make your child place the stickers on a precise, pre-designed spot, or according to some instructions (up, down, on the right, etc…)
- Ask your child to group the stickers according to their colours, shapes, sizes…
Using stickers is generally quite appreciated and is not expensive: you can get a lot of them for very reasonable prices.
Eye Like Stickers
Figurative stickers will help you move to new exercises. Matthieu is very fond of animal- or letter-shaped stickers. I ask him to:
- place the stickers the right way up (head up)
- Choose a specific sticker (goat, pig, etc…) on the sheet
- Point animals as I name them, once they are all stuck on the piece of paper
- Repeat the name of animals or the letters and numbers as he is placing them on the piece of paper
These stickers are a little more expensive, being very pretty and of better quality. However, the booklets I buy for Matthieu contain a lot of them (around 400 stickers per booklet).
Melissa & Doug Activity Books
You’ll also find stickers that are more elaborate, but offer creative sticking options for older or craftier children.
For children in need of working on imagination and body conceptualization (eyes, mouth, arms position, etc…), you can use the following stickers. Elements (eyes, mouth) are to be added once the main pieces have been placed on the piece of paper, and then the other missing parts are drawn (hair, nose…).
Cahier de créations Printemps-Été
Cahier de créations Automne-Hiver
Matthieu spends a lot of time playing with stickers; his therapeutic team work with booklets I have brought, and use them for other learning purposes as well.
Translation: Aurélie
