Apps For Fine Motor Skills Webinar

I chose the Fine Motor Skills webinar because I thought I’d find it particularly useful not only in the Learning Centre/Resource room, but also in the classroom. I could end up in any of those places in September (if I’m lucky).

I liked the overview of fine motor skill development and how fine motor skills apply to our curriculum outcomes – I’m the kind of learner that needs to hear things over and over again so even though I’ve heard explanations like this before, the more times I hear it the better.

One of the things that generally struck me about this Webinar was that the demonstrators of the apps seemed to be having fun – and they were fun to watch. I wanted to get my hands on several of the games, just to give them a try. There’s also the novelty of some of the stylus options that are available, there seems to be a ton of different options, and you could really customize it to a student.

Also of particular importance to me was that all of these apps would be engaging. I picture a lot of the users of these apps as being in lower elementary school and possibly having difficulties with attention. I’m thinking of a couple of students in particular of mine, one who was in grade 3 and the other in grade 2. In consultation with the OT at my school, I was using a variety of techniques with them to help improve their fine motor skills, particularly with printing. Both would have loved the pinching and dragging activities, as well as the Cars2 app. What I could really see working well for them, though, are Injini and Touch and Write. I think they would love all the neat features of Touch and Write (like writing with ketchup), and Injini is extremely straight-forward in terms of taking the guess-work out of the developmental sequence of pre-printing skills.

I’m glad I watched this webinar, and I’m very interested to read what my classmates wrote about the math webinar as well.