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 […]
Encouraging the Non-Dominant Leg
We will often have kids who have a very strong preference for one leg over the other when they are doing functional activities. Because they rely so heavily on the one leg, it gets stronger and that continues the cycle of them wanting to use just that leg. While it would be great for them […]
Ball Throws For Core Strength
One of our therapists recently used a ball activity to work on core strength. To make it even more fun, we did an experiment to see what was easier and what was more challenging. We took a variety of different ball sizes and then played catch with them. What made it into a core activity […]
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 […]
Planks
We have been doing planks with a few kids recently. There are lots of ways to work on them to make them harder or easier. We show you a few in the video but we will also talk about a few other ways as well. Using hands and toes is more challenging than using hands […]
Working on Functional Tasks in a Clinic
Because we do most of our work in a clinic setting we often have to get creative on how to support a family with working on tasks that will carry over to home. There are so many tasks out there that I will take a minute and talk about one task that we modified in […]