Our blogs are inspired by our passion for enhancing childhood development and pediatric physical therapy. We write for both parents and professionals and work to provide a mix of education, activity/treatment ideas, and our favorite toys. Because we write for you, we would love to know what topics you are interested in or what questions you have that we can answer!
Skipping
Skipping is a skill that can be very common amongst kids. But, it can be a skill that is hard to teach. The child needs to have coordination and strength and balance to name a few things. A lot of times when we ask a child to skip they will go straight into galloping (we […]
Galloping
Galloping and skipping are two activities that kids will often do when they are playing. We’re going to talk a little bit about galloping today. When it comes to teaching kids how to gallop, we will try to break it down into steps with cueing and then slowly remove cues and add the steps together. […]
Practicing Throwing Overhand
Last week we talked about practicing catching in this post! Some of the same ideas are going to be applicable. You want to consider what ball you are asking the child to throw with. You are also going to want to consider the distance you are starting out at. In addition, underhand and […]
Core Stability vs Core Strength
I was recently on a hike with a friend and she asked why are people always saying the kids in her class need more core strength. To her, they seemed to be plenty strong, and then she listed all the activities they could do. When I asked what they had trouble with that led people […]
Practicing Catching
Working on catching can be challenging for some kids (we will talk about throwing also, and some of the things I am about to say here will also apply). Besides having to have the strength, and coordination, and the reaction time, they also have to focus on the activity and visually attend to the ball. […]
Dynamic Sitting Balance Activities
Our last post had ideas for dynamic standing balance activities. Well while we were talking about those activities we thought of ways we could modify them to work on sitting balance as well as improve core strength! Since the ideas are really similar in terms of activities to our Standing Dynamic Balance post we will […]
Dynamic Standing Balance Activities
We had a request for more dynamic balance activities. Here are a few that focus on standing. They are all similar but can all be modified to make them easier or harder. In addition the activity changes slightly so you can adapt it based on what motivates your child. We are just hoping to spark […]
Advanced Spots (for balance and precision)
As I wrote the last blog post, we also turned it into an insta-story (check out our instagram account) and while doing that I had ideas for ways to progress the activities we were talking about. Here are a few of those ways: Hang balls from strings. You can have the child stand facing the […]
Using Spots for Balance (and so much more…)
We recently had a child come in who needed a lot of work on balance (static and dynamic). In addition to the balance deficits, the following areas were also challenging: body awareness, weight shifting, single leg stance, motor planning, and visual and auditory processing. We were looking for an activity that could begin to work […]
Five Signs of Torticollis
The American Physical Therapy Association Academy of Pediatric Physical Therapy recently published an updated evidenced-based clinical practice guideline for the management of Congenital Muscular Torticollis. The evidence supports better outcomes along with shorter treatment duration with early identification and intervention. This has us thinking all about what we can do to help with this early […]