Lior is a pleasant six year old girl who attends preschool. She visits our clinic once a week due to difficulties in motor planning and completing directed table-top tasks. She also exhibits a short attention span and works very slowly during didactic (instructional learning) activities.
Her parents describe Lior as an energetic and active child who moves quickly from game to game and prefers active play in open spaces rather than quiet, table-top activities. Before she started preschool, Lior was not really required to sit for an extended period of time in order to complete table top tasks. Today when she is asked to complete didactic or grapho-motor tasks, she does not exhibit the ability to persevere through to completion of the activity, and gets up from the table many times during the task.
Goals: Improve Motor planning and increase attention span
Method: Combining gross motor and table top activities, in order to gradually decrease the length of time spent on gross motor activities in larger spaces and increase Lior’s time on and tolerance for table top didactic tasks.
In order to keep her focused during therapy sessions, I used Timocco to challenge her while having a fun experience. In the balloon game we worked on attention skills. Lior wore game gloves on both of her hands, and every time she had to pop the balloon with a different glove according to the pin color on the screen. The colors changed randomly and she had to notice what hand she had to use next. On our first session she had a hard time following the rules and planning which hand she had to use. She lost patience and was unable to complete the task. At the next session she played for a longer period of time and was able to pay attention to the shifting requirement of popping the balloon according to the different color of the glove.
Progress to date: During our following sessions, Lior would ask to play with Timocco. Tailoring the game to Lior’s unique abilities (both motor and attentive) allowed me to provide tasks that were both challenging and fun, so despite her difficulties she is clearly making an effort to succeed and has in fact improved her skills – for the bubble bath and falling fruit games improvement has been noted in motor planning from one therapy session to the next.
Sharon Chatan,BOT
‘Words and Rhymes’ Clinic, Akko (Acre, Israel)
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