Activities At Home
Below are listed some activities that you can perform with your child at home to promote their development.
Promote Functional Mobility:
Functional mobility is the ablity of your child to go form one place to another within your home. This activity can also build strength and endurance. One activity that could be fun for you and your child is to construct an obstacle course in your living room. Encourageing your child to be creative in ambulating through the obstacles can also build problem solving skills.
Promote Hand Writing Skills:
Kinesthetic perception is the ability to know where a joint or limb is and awareness of movement. Because of decreased strength and sensation to specific areas of the body children with spina bifida often have poor kinesthetic perception(8). To help improve kinesthetic perception and eventually handwriting try painting at an easle. Holding a paintbrush and moving it up and down the easel paper withy your hands and arms while they are raised in front of you provides visual and tactile input. Incorporating and conditioning those inputs will help develop the kinesthetic perception. Another great activity is using large bubble wands and waving them to create huge bubbles to watch and pop.(3)
Promote Social Skills:
Your child may want to withdraw from social settings because of their deficits. It is important to encourage,not force, interacting socially at an early age. Ways to accomplish this can be as simple as going to a local park or playground. Engaging your child in social interaction with peers at an early age can help to improve their self image and give them the confidence to be socially active when they reach school-age.
Promoting Strength in Trunk and Upper Extremrties:
It is important to maintain or improve strength in your childs trunk, arms and hands as they develop. One activity that you can use to promote this is sitting on a excercise ball and sorting objects. For instance, you could put different colored sand in sandwich ziplock baggies and ask the child to sort the baggies by color. Sitting on the excercise ball and performing this task will improve trunk stability as well as improve balance. The organizing of sand is good for improving strength because of the weight of the sand and gripping of the baggies. Weight of the bagies can also be gradded up or down according to the abilities of your child. This activity also addresses cognition through color recognition and sorting.
Promoting Executive Function:
For some children with Spina Bifida that aquire hydrocephalus Execttive Function (or planning,organizing skills)can prove to be difficult. Devising charts of daily schedules can assist in remembering events throughout the day and improve their ability to plan ahead for the day. Another tool that may help is creating sequence cards to assist with certain areas such as self care. This can help your child to learn the proper order to accomplish certain tasks like washing hands or taking a bath.
Functional mobility is the ablity of your child to go form one place to another within your home. This activity can also build strength and endurance. One activity that could be fun for you and your child is to construct an obstacle course in your living room. Encourageing your child to be creative in ambulating through the obstacles can also build problem solving skills.
Promote Hand Writing Skills:
Kinesthetic perception is the ability to know where a joint or limb is and awareness of movement. Because of decreased strength and sensation to specific areas of the body children with spina bifida often have poor kinesthetic perception(8). To help improve kinesthetic perception and eventually handwriting try painting at an easle. Holding a paintbrush and moving it up and down the easel paper withy your hands and arms while they are raised in front of you provides visual and tactile input. Incorporating and conditioning those inputs will help develop the kinesthetic perception. Another great activity is using large bubble wands and waving them to create huge bubbles to watch and pop.(3)
Promote Social Skills:
Your child may want to withdraw from social settings because of their deficits. It is important to encourage,not force, interacting socially at an early age. Ways to accomplish this can be as simple as going to a local park or playground. Engaging your child in social interaction with peers at an early age can help to improve their self image and give them the confidence to be socially active when they reach school-age.
Promoting Strength in Trunk and Upper Extremrties:
It is important to maintain or improve strength in your childs trunk, arms and hands as they develop. One activity that you can use to promote this is sitting on a excercise ball and sorting objects. For instance, you could put different colored sand in sandwich ziplock baggies and ask the child to sort the baggies by color. Sitting on the excercise ball and performing this task will improve trunk stability as well as improve balance. The organizing of sand is good for improving strength because of the weight of the sand and gripping of the baggies. Weight of the bagies can also be gradded up or down according to the abilities of your child. This activity also addresses cognition through color recognition and sorting.
Promoting Executive Function:
For some children with Spina Bifida that aquire hydrocephalus Execttive Function (or planning,organizing skills)can prove to be difficult. Devising charts of daily schedules can assist in remembering events throughout the day and improve their ability to plan ahead for the day. Another tool that may help is creating sequence cards to assist with certain areas such as self care. This can help your child to learn the proper order to accomplish certain tasks like washing hands or taking a bath.