Do you use effective teaching strategies like congruent feedback? It is an excellent tool to help children learn and improve motor skills. How Does Congruent Feedback Work? Here is how congruent feedback works. Pick a Skill Decide upon one step or motion of the skill that you and the child thinks needs improvement or […]
Motor Learning in Children Do you ever find that a child may learn a new motor skill (i.e. skipping) only to forget it rather quickly? Or perhaps you teach a child a new skill and he/she remembers how to execute it for a long time (i.e. bike riding)? There are many reasons why the body […]
As pediatric therapists, we constantly utilize motor learning strategies to help children acquire new motor skills. One motor learning strategy that has been heavily researched is Singer’s Five-Step Approach. Motor Learning Strategies: The Five Step Approach This approach to learning a new motor task consists of the following five steps: Readying The learner adopts a […]
What do you think is the best feedback frequency with children when learning a motor task? Previous research with adults indicates that providing feedback 100% of the time when learning a new task is less effective than when less feedback is provided. In addition, previous research has indicated that children with cerebral palsy benefit from […]
Keyboarding is a complex task that requires students to internalize motor sequences in order to become proficient. Students need to use visual and kinesthetic feedback to locate and utilize the correct keys to produce written work. Starting with cogntion and vision, motor memory and self-correction, students slowly become efficient at keyboarding. Keyboarding and motor learning involve […]
Motor Learning in Children with Unilateral Cerebral Palsy Disability and Rehabilitation published research to examine explicit and implicit learning in children with unilateral cerebral palsy. The study compared the motor learning of children with left and right unilateral cerebral palsy and typically developing children while they shuffled disks toward a target using a prism-adaptation design. Each […]
During therapy sessions, we frequently break down activities into smaller parts or chunks to make it easier for children to learn new motor or life skills. As the child progresses with those individual parts of the skill, the child then practices the entire activity as a whole. Sometimes this is done in an isolated environment […]
Research in Developmental Disabilities published an article comparing implicit versus explicit motor learning in 30 boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their age and IQ matched peers. Each children participated in a serial reaction time task (SRTT). The children were separated into different groups based on diagnosis and implicit or explicit learning for the […]
The Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities published research on the effects of physical and mental practice in acquisition, retention, and transfer of a motor skill in 29 males with cerebral palsy. The participants were assigned to three homogenous groups; physical practice (n = 10), mental practice (n = 10), and control (n = 9). The experimental groups (physical and mental […]
Here is a freebie page from Personal Space Journey which is a collection of activities to teach children about maintaining personal space. You can download the body cards at https://www.yourtherapysource.com/personalspacejourneyfreebie.html Here are some suggestions to use the cards for: 1. Musical Body Poses: Scatter the cards around the room. Move to music. Turn the music off. […]