Teaching Your Child to Walk Home Exercise Program
In this video, Erin Lundy our PT shows you some in-home tips and tricks for teaching your child to walk.
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Improving Fine Motor Skills with Playdoh
In this video, Cindy shows you some fun, easy and therapeutic activities you can do with your child right at home using Playdoh.
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Creating a Sensory Path at Home
In this video, Elissia shows you how to make a sensory path right at home. A sensory path is a fun and playful way to help develop a child's motor skills like balance, hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness. These sensory paths can also give your child a much needed "brain break" and help to get the wiggles out! Enjoy!
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How to Make Your Own Sensory Paper
In this video, our PT Megan shows you how to do 10 different animal walks that can help to improve your child's strength, coordination and balance. The animal walks include: bear walk, crab walk, bunny hop, kangaroo hop, frog hop, penguin waddle, dinosaur stomps, lizard, inchworm and the flamingo.
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Activities on a Therapy Ball
In this video, Caryn shows you some activities you can do with a therapy/exercise ball with your child. These exercises can help to strengthen your child's core, work on sensory integration, increase hand-eye coordination, and improve social communication (making eye contact during the exercises).
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Torticollis and Plagiocephaly
Plagiocephaly (aka “flat head syndrome”) results from babies being placed on their backs for prolonged periods of time beyond just during sleep. Another common incidence of being on their backs for too long is Torticollis (aka “tight neck syndrome”). These are some techniques that parents can use at home to help round out their child's head and make their neck feel less tight. This helps their head not only become more rounded, but also helps the child be able to achieve their motor milestones and helps facial structures to grow symmetrically as they get older.
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Toe Walking
A lot of kids will toe walk if they crave sensory stimulation (they like the bouncing on their toes), have Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy, autism or if they just have tight calves. The two most common impairments that I treat with this are working with tight calves and making their foot muscles stronger. This helps them to walk with more stability (they aren’t falling over as much), able to clear their feet from the ground or stairs (again, not falling as much) and reduces the pain associated with having tight calves and feet.
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How to Help Your Child Learn to Stand Independently
Erin demonstrates different ways to help encourage your child to stand independently while building their core strength.
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Improving Core Strength: Activities Using Household Items
This video provides six activities for children using a laundry basket, and a few other common household items. Each activity provides a variety of developmental benefits. The main skills these activities target are core strength, upper-extremity strength, proximal stability (strong base), dynamic balance, motor planning, and hand-eye coordination. These activities are great to incorporate into therapy sessions, and/or for kiddos to play with siblings/caregivers. They are designed for children with varying abilities, and are easily modified to fit each child's need.
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Games to Improve Gross Motor Skills While Stuck at Home
Erin, one of our amazing Physical Therapists, shows you three games she uses a lot during her tele-therapy sessions and parents can too: a) Gross motor bingo is a game where the child yells out a number and we do the corresponding number’s gross motor suggestions (i.e. wall sitting) to help keep the child engaged as well as working on strength and motor milestone acquisition, b) Animal yoga: this works on a child’s proprioception (ability to figure out where their bodies are in space) as well as proximal joint stability (makes muscle stronger, which is especially important for kids that are “loosy goosy” or hypotonic). The child yells out an animal name and we scroll to that corresponding animal and hold the pose that is recommended for that animal. c) The wheel decides: this is a game that can be applied to tons of different activities. In this example, I used animal walks as the wheel category. Basically, we tap the screen and the wheel spins and lands on what animal is recommended, and we have to walk around like this animal. This is good for proximal joint stability, gait patterns, motor planning, etc.
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