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~Body Awareness~
As Occupational Therapists, we work on many different skills throughout the school year including fine motor (small muscle movement and strength), gross motor (large muscle movement and strength), hand-eye coordination, sensory integration and many other skills that help students be successful in their academic environment. Each month we will focus on an important skill that is crucial to academic success.
This month's newsletter is going to focus on body awareness. Body awareness is the ability to recognize where your body is in space. Your muscles and joints send your brain information about your body and how it moves. We will explore why body awareness is so important, how to develop body awareness and some great activities that you can do at home to promote this skill. When working on body awareness, it is also a great time to incorporate or introduce left and right vocabulary to build left/right discrimination. Left, Right, Center is a fun game to work on left and right and the whole family can play!
I hope you have fun working on body awareness
The Dunkirk OT department
Why is body awareness important?
Body awareness helps us to understand how to relate to objects and people at home, at school and outdoors. For example, proper body awareness tells us how far to reach for objects or how close to stand next to a person.
Sometimes, if people have difficulties with body awareness they may appear clumsy, uncoordinated or have delays in motor skill development.
Body awareness is important to teach throughout childhood development because research indicates that the multisensory foundations of the bodily self develop throughout early and mid-childhood, reaching an adult state by 10 to 11 years.
Body Awareness and Spatial Awareness
Body Awareness and Spatial Awareness
Spatial awareness is the ability to understand and interact with the environment around you. Whether it be avoiding obstacles when walking, reaching out to grab a pencil or determining left from right these are all examples of tasks that require spatial awareness. Developing the skills to express and understand spatial skills are the first step in understanding spatial ability and awareness such as math skills, visual perceptual skills, and body awareness.
Research indicates that visual-spatial abilities contribute to a larger extent to children’s verbal number skills than verbal abilities which is important for the conception of early mathematics assessments and interventions. In addition, the role of spatial skills, notably spatial orientation, were important for mathematical development.
Visual spatial skills have also been shown to be related to motor coordination and handwriting skills.
How can you help your child develop body awareness?
There are many activities that you and your child can incorporate into your daily schedule to improve their body awareness to help them become more confident in not only the classroom but the world as well. The key is doing them often.
“Each child must learn for oneself what the body can do, and how and where the body moves. Learning can only take place by doing! The “doing” should be guided by aware, informed and knowledgeable teachers and parents. Every child deserves the right to become master of one’s self.” (Creating Body Image and Awareness)
Start out by reviewing and identifying body parts. Begin with very simple commands such as kick your leg, wave your hand or shake your head. Then progress to motor commands such as “touch your elbow”. Then progress to more difficult commands such as “touch your right knee”.
You can make the skills even more difficult by practicing touching different body parts to different body parts ie touch your left hand to your right ear, put your right elbow on your left thumb, etc.
Activity ideas for body awareness
Trying playing games that reinforce body awareness such as Simon Says or Follow the Leader.
Practice drawing pictures of people or ask the child to draw a picture of himself or herself. Name body parts as they are drawn.
Set up obstacle courses for the child to go over, under, around and in between objects.
Complete heavy work activities such as pushing, pulling or carrying heavy objects. This will help to reinforce where the joints and muscles are in space.
Hand clapping games. Check out this video to learn 6 hand-clapping games.
Sometimes a child may benefit from changes to the environment in order to help with body awareness.
Try putting an ‘X’ on the floor where you want the child to sit.
Perhaps a chair with arms on it will help to provide an external cue of where the body needs to stay seated.
The child may do better walking at the front or back of a line instead of in the middle of the line.
To prevent the child from slipping out of the chair or from knocking objects over put non-skid materials (ie rug gripper) on the seat or desktop.
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