Motor Skills Season Ep 1: Intro to Motor Development

Let's jump into season 2 - all the components of Motor Development. Embark on a journey of discovery as we unwrap the layers of motor development in children, ensuring every parent and educator is equipped with the knowledge to foster growth. 

This episode is a quick taster into what is to come, where we don't just focus on the end result but intent consider everything your child's body and brain needs to coordinate and complete to achieve their goals! Stay tuned for a season filled with growth, learning, and the empowerment of our children's motor development journey.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:10

Good morning everyone and welcome back to season. Well, not welcome back. Welcome to the second season of Bell's OT Corner. We've wrapped up our sensory season, our first sensory season, and I'm so excited to announce that our second season we're going to and I'm so excited to announce that our second season we're going to be digging into all things motor development, all the bits and pieces that come into when we consider what our gross motor and our fine motor skills are. Now, for this season, what I'm envisioning, instead of just going into these, are the motor skills and these what we can do to build the motor skills. I actually want to take that bigger picture, look and look at what same as we did with our sensory season, look at what some of those building blocks are when we talk about our motor development, what might be some of the things that could be impacting upon, or what are some of the skills that we need, particularly when we start to think about some of these more complex motor movements that we might have to do. So what I thought I'd do today is it's going to be a short and sweet episode. I mean, I say that sometimes and then the episode ends up dragging out longer, but we'll see how we go. I'm hoping a nice short and sweet episode that's going to just give you a bit of an overview into what we're going to be talking about through this season and then next week. So you only have to wait one week this time, guys. Next week I'm going to release the first episode where we get into some more of the nitty-gritty bits and pieces. But this is just a quick little overview about what's to come, what you can expect, and if you then have any questions that trigger from this, send them my way and I'll make sure I incorporate them into the rest of the season.

Speaker 1 1:48

So what I want you to think about when we think about this sort of child development milestones, motor development, gross motor skills, fine motor skills, all of these key buzzwords and it can be quite stressful buzzwords for a lot of parents, because there's lots of things that can impact upon how a child engages with their motor development and with some of their gross motor skills and fine motor skills, and so those developmental checklists can be really quite scary. They can be really helpful for some parents, but they can be really scary for other parents as well, and what I want to talk about first, quickly, is just that sort of bigger picture of what can impact upon our motor development. And when we think about this, are motor developments impacted by the child in the sense of what they're motivated by if there might be a diagnosis in the mix and what they're interested in or motivated by it can also be impacted by the environment that they're in. And so this could be things like you know, do you live in an apartment or a house Not that it's a problem either way but do you have access to a backyard or do you go to the park? Because these are going to be different skills the child learns. And wherever you live, we then just look about, okay. So how can we tweak that environment, how can we set up that space to allow the child the possibility to start to explore what they're interested in?

Speaker 1 3:16

Because when we think about motor development, it's actually this stage of our lives where we're figuring out how to use our bodies to explore the world. You know, if you think about a baby that you've got in your arms, the first thing they're going to do is start to look around, and then they might start to lift up their head, and they can oh, I can lift my head and I can look around even more. That's kind of cool. And then we start to figure out that we've got arms and they can flap, and I've got legs and they can kick, and then out that we've got arms and they can flap, and I've got legs and they can kick. And then I might bring my legs up to my face and grab them and put them in my mouth. But then eventually we move to I can roll over, I can be on my tummy and I can lift my head up when I'm in my tummy, or maybe I can crawl, maybe I skip crawling and I go straight to walking. But before I can walk I pull to stand and I balance on standing and it's all about how we can use our bodies to figure out different ways to interact with the world.

Speaker 1 4:08

As we get older it might be that I get some more control in my fine motor movements and so I can do some more precise actions. I might be getting better at being able to kick a ball and aim on the target or throw and catch a ball. And then we jump ahead again and I'm learning to balance on a scooter and ride a bike. And they we jump ahead again and I'm learning to balance on a scooter and ride a bike, and they're all different ways of us figuring out what my body can do and how I can use my body to interact with the world. And so, regardless of the stage at which a child gets through it, I want you to keep that idea in the back of your mind that it's actually worth just helping this kid, your kid, a child in your class, figure out how they can interact with our world. And so just a quick note on that. As we do all of this, you will hear me refer back to different bits of the sensory season that we've just done, because, again, we are getting that information in and then we're responding, and so that's a large motivator for us to then interact with the world. I hear a noise, and so I want to be able to turn my head and lift my body to look at that noise. And so, as we're younger, our brains figure out how to coordinate all of these movements to then be able to interact in our worlds in different ways.

Speaker 1 5:24

So when we think about kids, kids' brains are hardwired to engage in lots of learning. When we think about kids, kids' brains are hardwired to engage in lots of learning. The amount of learning they take in is phenomenal, particularly compared to us adults. We get a little bit stuck and we start to do the same things, and that's not to say we can't learn new things we definitely can. But the amount of learning that a child's brain goes through on day to day is just phenomenal. And so we want to make sure that we're supporting that child to be able to engage in that learning, that things aren't too tricky, that they're motivated to keep trying and keep persisting through until they can achieve it.

Speaker 1 6:00

And this is a really big one within the motor development scene, because we don't want the activities to be too physically exhausting, because then, well, who wants to do it? If I have to go to the gym and someone's going to tell me I'm not a runner, by the way, and if someone tells me, come on, let's go to the gym, we're going to run 10k, no, not a chance. Someone says, come on, we'll run 1k, I can run 1k, I might even end up running two or three. But if someone starts off and says, come on, let's go, let's run 10k, you're not getting me out of the house, good luck. And so we always want to think about making it that just right level of challenge so that the child is willing to engage and has that sense of. It's hard but I can do it and that's the most important bit. It's tricky but I can do it.

Speaker 1 6:45

So, jumping back to our developed milestones again, I want I'll refer to them a little bit throughout this um season, but I do just want you guys to think about it as a bit of a guide of the progression. So we want to kind of flow through this sort of progression because as we go through it it helps us build some fundamental skills that we might need for a later milestone or a later goal that we're trying to achieve, need for a later milestone or a later goal that we're trying to achieve. But I don't want you to stress too much about the times that your child might be doing them. It's a nice indicator of if it's time to go and seek some help. But, as we said before, there's so many other factors at play and if your child does have a diagnosis that can be attributing and then that's when you can seek help and go and see an occupational therapist and so we very much use them as a guide If you are seeing your child is a little bit delayed, that's when you can then go and seek some help to be able to get the right bits of guidance for how you can tweak different bits and pieces to support your child to build those skills. But it's not something that it must be within these two months. We must take this one. If it's a month later, if it's two months later, three months later, it's okay. We just want to help that continued progression and that continued exploring and learning.

Speaker 1 7:57

So, as I said, in this season we're going to look at some of those building blocks that the child's brain goes through as they develop these motor skills. And you might have heard some of these words before, but we're going to think about and talk about things like body awareness, motor planning, bilateral integration, crossing, midline spatial awareness, postural control, dyspraxia, hypermobility. The list is going to go on and on and, as I did before, I'll kind of clump the ones that are similar together to make it a little bit easier for you guys to understand, and for each we're going to look at, well, what is it, so we can learn a little bit together. What does that mean practically and in terms of those occupations? What can that impact upon. And so how can we make those tweaks and adjustments and how can we change the way that we talk and change the way that we interact with our kids to make it a little bit easier for them to keep trying?

Speaker 1 8:53

Or what are some of the activities that I use that I find are really, really helpful in building up some of these skills? And so I want you to think about motor development, as I said before, as how a kid learns to engage with the world around them. We can break it down further into, like our fine motor skills and our gross motor skills, and you tend to see that the gross well, you don't tend to see. You will see that the gross motor skills initially develop a lot, and then we do a little bit of fine motor and then we build some gross motor and then we build some fine motor again, and as we build some more, we build some fine motor again, and as we build some more skills, our precision and our dexterity improves as well. And this is the last little bit that I wanted to touch on today, just around why we might see that, and I'll refer to it a lot throughout the season, but I want you to think about us all your children or adults even as needing that really stable base of support.

Speaker 1 9:54

And the best way to think about this is kind of how a tree grows and so, as a tree grows, the first thing that happens is it builds a really nice, strong trunk. It grows straight up. It has, you know, small branches. They're there, but they're not those big, luscious branches you see in those trees that are hundreds and hundreds of years old. First they need that really, really stable trunk that's going to hold them up. It might wobble in the wind but it's going to be nice and secure For us. That's our core. We need that postural control, that core stability, that strength through our back to keep myself upright, through our back to keep myself upright.

Speaker 1 10:35

Once we start to have that, the tree starts to grow out its branches and as it grows taller and gets a bigger base of support, the branches grow longer and longer. But we still have some little branches when it's a smaller baby tree. And that's the exact same with, kind of, our arms and our legs. We flap them around. To start, we do those big banging actions, we kick our legs out in every direction, but then, as we build a stronger trunk and a stronger core, we start to have some more control over those movements. We start to make more deliberate movements like reaching for a high five, or maybe I'm starting to learn to pull, to stand and walk, and we start to learn how to control my arms and my legs. Now that I have a nice strong, stable core and our core will keep building. It's not that we build a really strong core and then we do arms. They happen together. But just think about the importance of that really strong base, because once we have both of those and we think of our trees, the next thing that happens is those little leaves.

Speaker 1 11:30

And that's when we think about the control that we might have in our fingers and our toes. Technically, but we don't use our toes very much more. So what we do with our fingers and this is where we might start to develop that pincer grip, where we're using our thumb and our pointer finger to pick things up, and when we might start to be able to turn things over I might be able to do a little bit of in-hand manipulation. So if, if I have a coin or a couple of coins in my hands, I don't need to put them all down to pick up the one that I need. I can roll them around in my fingers and find the one that I want and I have that more precise control.

Speaker 1 12:02

Now this is possible to do without a strong base of support and without stability through my shoulder, but it is so much harder for the body and for the brain, and so so often I see kids that come in to see me and they're like oh you know, I'm really struggling with my buttons and I'm struggling with this and we can work on those. But just quietly in the background I say to the parents just start playing some of these games where we and we're just going to tweak a couple of things to help build up some of that strong pace. We are still going to practice the activity itself, but we're just going to help the brain start to get a little bit of that stronger base of support, a little bit more confidence in what it's doing, so that we can then be able to do some of those fine motor tasks a little bit easier and it's not going to be as exhausting for both our muscles and also our brain to do, because as soon as things are exhausting as I said before with the 10k no one wants to do it and as much as kids are learners and they, you know, are incredibly persistent and incredibly resilient, there is a point where things get too hard, there is a point where their brain just has enough, and there is a point where they get physically exhausted, and that's okay, and that's where we can then help and work with them to build up some of that strength and help them be in a position where they can manage the task that they're trying to do. Oh, look at that, guys. I have kept it short and sweet, so I can't wait to dig into this episode with you guys, and we dig into all the different bits around what is important for those motor development skills and what are some things that you can do at home and what are some things that you can do at school to support these kids.

Speaker 1 13:42

And, truthfully, well, one quick more thing the other thing that I did mean to mention, in terms of some of those environmental things, is the way the world is going with technology, and technology is amazing, don't get me wrong, but technology is very addictive for children, and so you see, kids that may that you know will have a preference to sit and play on the iPad instead of running around outside, and it can be a big barrier at school as well, and so some of these activities and some of these things that we talk through will be helpful for all children, you know.

Speaker 1 14:14

So, if you're thinking about things that you can do in a class, there might be one or two kids, or three or four kids, or maybe even more, that you look at and go. I think we're having some difficulties in this area, but, realistically, practicing this with my whole class is going to be very, very beneficial as well. Alrighty, that's it from me, guys. I cannot wait to chat with you guys next week for our first really itty bit uh, la, la la for our first nitty gritty I was about to say itty bitty for our first nitty gritty episode about all these components of our motor development. I hope you all have a great week and we'll chat soon. Bye, guys, you.