Was walking through the clinic the other day and saw this great idea for working on single leg stance. I’ve also tried it with a few other kids and it’s great! Start with a softer, squisher ball to make it easier. We like to use a Gertie style ball. Have the child stand next to […]
Encouraging Balance Reactions
One of our therapists was recently working on balance reactions with a child and I thought it was such a great simple idea. You take some Squigz and put them on a surface. We don’t have a good child height surface so we use a wedge. The goal is for the child to pull them […]
Crab Walking
I love when I walk around the clinic and see some of the creative ideas the therapists come up with. This was one I just saw. They were using a puzzle and would crab walk the pieces from one side of the mat (or room) to the other. The puzzle piece rested on their stomach […]
Progressing to Independent Walking
We seem to have a bunch of little ones right now that are working on taking independent steps. They have cruising down and are walking with a push toy. They just don’t like to let go of the support surface, or sometimes, even shift their weight forward. We have a few techniques we have been […]
Stability Circuit
We have so many kids who are working on stability with functional mobility. So recently for this one kid we created a circuit just for him to work on his stability! Here are some of the tasks it included: Balance Beam – We chose a tall narrow one so that this child would have to […]
Core Stability
What the heck is core stability and does my child have it? Does my child really need it? Do I even have it? Our abdominal and trunk muscles make up our core, the center of our entire body. Their strength and ability to work together to create stability is essential for all of our movement. […]
Core Strength and New Walkers
When kids first learn to walk, they aren’t steady or confident in their motor skills and balance (not that they know this, but their bodies do) and they need ways to control all the joints. They will often lock out joints to control degrees of freedom so there are less things moving that they have […]
Gait Analysis
We were recently asked to talk about how we do gait analysis for kids with neuromuscular challenges such as cerebral palsy. We have a few things that we do depending on what we are trying to find out. For this post I will talk about our go to method. Our main method of doing gait […]
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 […]