Finding toys for your kids can be challenging when you’re competing with a Smartphone or tablet. Here are some recommendations, based on age and development, that help with the challenge:
1-2 years
Children at this age are learning about their surroundings through exploration. Find toys that they can analyze and tinker with to promote cognitive, fine, and visual perceptual/motor development.
Wooden Puzzle Shape Sorter
Since our post “The Importance of Play“, we have received a few questions regarding the use of screen time. Here is a quick cheat sheet if you are in the middle of the screen time battle.
What is screen time?
Screen time refers to any sedentary activity involving the use of visual electronic media. Examples include: smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions, and video games. Little to no physical effort is utilized during screen time.
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Oc-You-Low-Motor.
Oculomotor relates to the motion of the eye. The eye muscles are just like any other voluntary muscle, they need to be exercised! This flashlight activity is the perfect example of activating and exercising the eye muscles and still having fun.
When it comes to handwriting, we have found that vision is one of the most overlooked and underestimated systems in children. We’ve been taught that if a child has 20/20 vision, they do not have a visual issue that will affect their academic performance. But in truth, children who have difficulties processing and perceiving what they see still quietly struggle in school.
Visual perception is the total process responsible for receiving and interpreting what we see. This allows us to make accurate judgments within our environment such as size, configuration, and spatial relationships of objects.
To do this, our visual-receptive components and visual-cognitive components must work efficiently. If one of these areas is compromised, it will affect how a child understands and responds to visual information.
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An effective pencil grasp is one that allows for the greatest amount of finger movement and the least amount of fatigue in the hand muscles. This requires hand and finger strength, finger isolation, manual dexterity, and wrist stability. Here is a quick list of activities to help.
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Child(ish) Advice 