Fine Motor Skills: What Is Bilateral Coordination
Fine Motor Skills (FMS) are the coordination of small muscles to perform skills that generally involve our hands and fingers.
Fine Motor Skills includes the development of ✅ Bilateral Coordination/Crossing the Midline ✅ Handwriting/Tracing (including grips) ✅ Scissor Skills.
Today we will be focussing on Bilateral Coordination; firstly what is it, and secondly, how important it is.
In short, bilateral coordination is essential in helping children gain independence in day to day life.
🍎 What Is Bilateral Coordination? (Crossing the Midline)
Bilateral coordination, or crossing the midline (imagine a line down the centre of your body from your nose to your belly button) is any action that requires the arms or legs to
A. reach across the middle line, or
B. to work toegther at the midline, to complete a task.
Bilateral coordination is essential in helping children establish independence in every day life such as:
✅ writing without changing hands
✅ crossing our legs
✅ getting dressed & undressed
✅ cutting up food
✅ zipping up a jumper
✅ brushing our teeth and the list goes on!
🍎 5 Ideas To Help Develop Bilateral Coordination:
These are some simple ways to practice bilateral coordination in every day activities. They don't involve extra work, but just a few small changes 😊😊😊
✅ Puzzles:
Place the puzzle pieces on the left hand side (where the right hand is dominant) and the puzzle board in front.
Encourage your child to reach over with their right hand, to pick up a puzzle piece and bring it back to the centre to complete the puzzle.
✅ Cut & Paste Activties:
Place the cut out pages on the left hand side and the scissors and glue on the right hand side of the table
Your child's non-dominant hand is referred to as their 'helping hand'.
Use the dominant hand to pick up the paper (and transfer it to the helping hand) and then pick up the scissors.
Cut out the activtiy using the 'helping hand' to maneuver the paper while holding the scissors and cutting with their dominant hand - this is quite tricky when only just starting this skill!
Once they have the knack of cutting, encourage your child to keep the scissors pointing in the same direction (away from their body), while using the 'helping hand' to move the paper around.
✅ Fishing Games:
This Fishing Set is perfect for crossing the midline!
Lay out the fish on the ocean mat
Place the ocean mat and the fishing rod on the left hand side of your child
Place the felt 'pond' on the right hand side
Use one hand to pick up the rod, catch a fish and place the fish in the pond
Swap hands and try fishing with the other hand!
Use one hand to pick up the rod, catch a fish and place the fish in the pond
Swap hands and try fishing with the other hand!
✅ Building Blocks:
Simply spread out the blocks (wooden, LEGOs etc) in an arc around your child so that they are required to reach across their body in different directions to pickup the pieces that they need - this can easily be done with a huge variety of daily activties!
✅ Cooking:
Mixing ingredients is such a fun way to practice bilateral coordination and they won't even know they are doing it!
Hold the bowl with one hand (or arm) and mix with the other in a circular motion
What other activties can you think of that involve bilateral coordination?!
