Get a Grip: Ideas to Improve Small Motor Control in Children

by Peggy Campbell-Rush, Lower School Director

Did you know that good handwriting starts in the shoulders?  The ability for a young child to be able to cut, color and use a pencil starts with a full range of muscles from the shoulder down through the finger tips.  It is important for children to climb, hold on and swings on swings, move their arms above their shoulders to promote muscle strength in the full arm for example.

There are many things that parents and teachers can do to help with this.  Anytime a child can raise his/her arms higher than the shoulder area and keep them up for a few minutes it helps the upper arm.  Often fingerplays and actions can be done with the hands held high.  Rotating the wrists to warm them up is helpful before a fine motor task.  Squeezing stress balls, twisting a sponge to release water and holding tight to grip something helps the palmer arch in the middle of the palm. Cleaning something with very small pieces of sponge or taking the plastic upper part out of a paintbrush and painting just with the nib help the tri-pod grip develop.  

Lower and Middle Schools kick off their year of community service activities

Stone Soup Day on October 6  kicked off the community service efforts of Gill St. Bernard’s Lower and Middle School students to provide lunch to the Senior Citizens Center of Plainfield once a month. During Stone Soup Day, each Lower School child brings one ingredient to add to the soup pot, showing that if each person shares a little, everyone can have enough. The youngest child, in the school traditionally throws the stone into the pot, assisted by eighth graders who have been at GSB since pre-school.  The soup cooks all day and is symbolically shared by the children for lunch the following day.)  The event is based on the fable of stone soup. 

Throughout the school year, the younger students make soup and sandwiches each month, which seventh and eighth graders then take to the new Plainfield Senior Citizen Center headquarters.  The children hold special "parties," "song fests" and other celebrations to mark various events at the Senior Center during the year.  In the spring, the senior citizens are brought from Plainfield to Gladstone to attend a special performance of the Middle School play and to have lunch on campus.

The "Stone Soup" program, which won the Grand Prize in Scholastic Magazine's Kid's Care contest several years ago, is an ongoing tradition at GSB and involves everyone at the Lower and Middle Schools.