Sensory System- Our window to the world. Enhanced through early exploration of the senses: touching and being touched, smelling, tasting, hearing, seeing, feeling, and a sense of balance and body position. Allowing your child to take bathes, go down slides, wear clothes, eat certain textured foods. Enables the child to perfect such skills as eye hand coordination and visual perception-essentials for math, reading, and writing.

Play- This is the occupation or job of babies and small children.
Through play a child will learn to develop motor coordination, cognitive concepts, and gain feelings of self-confidence. Fun play will encourage your child to practice new skills and master their environment.

Fine Motor Skills- Focusing on smaller muscles allows your child to control detailed movements. These movements require the use of smaller muscles of the body such as the eyes, face, tongue, hands and fingers. Important fine motor skills include smiling, following moving objects with their eyes and picking up small items such as food. These are all necessary skills for early exploration, body awareness, and play. Later these skills will lead to every day skills such as, dressing, grooming, and writing for school.

           

          Outline of Occupational Therapy Development Skills-Fine Motor Skills:

0-3 Months: Grasping rattles, releasing rattles, looks at rattles and follows objects with eyes, looks at hands, follows rattles looking side to side

3-5 Months: Holding and moving rattles, grasping objects, haves hands and looks at them, moves hands towards midline, brings hands together

6-7 Months: Bangs cup, bangs rattles, shakes rattles, gets one toy and then another, uses raking motion to get small object, pulls string on toy towards them, grasps cube, brings arms up to get rattle away from body

8-9 Months: Removes peg, grasps cube using thumb and second fingers, will hold two objects in one hand and reach for third, will get small pellet object using thumb and tip of first or second finger-inferior pincer, crumples paper, claps hands

10-11 Months: Pokes fingers in hole, removes rings, will grasp object with pad of thumb and tip of first or second-superior pincer, releases objects, puts object in cup, stirs a spoon, hits cup with spoon

12-14 Months: Removes multiple pegs, socks, opens a box, turns page to a book, dumps objects, builds tower, inserts

15-17 Months: Puts cubes in cup, imitates scribble, places pegs, remove socks, and inserts multiple shapes

18-23 Months: Pops beads, turns multiple pages, builds tower with multiple blocks, strings beads, cuts with scissors on paper

24-29 Months: Turns knob, places several rings, removes caps from bottle, builds train with cubes

30-35 Months: Builds tower with ten blocks, imitates horizontal stroke, strings several beads, cuts paper all the way across

36-41 Months: Shows hand preference, turns key or wind up toy, and draws a circle

42-50 Months: Can look and draw square, holds marker in tripod position, begins cutting circle with scissors, laces shoe in several holes

51-54 Months: Buttons button, puts paper clip on paper

55-58 Months: Cuts circle following lines, traces a line


59-62 Months: Touches fingers to each finger, places penny in rows

63 – 71 Months: Colors between lines, builds a pyramid, folds paper in half