Sensory Motor Activities

The foundation of growth, development, and learning in a child starts with sensory and motor interaction with the world. The brain is built from the bottom up and this starts with movement and sensory exploration. Sensory stimulation and feedback drive the brain, but the motor system drives sensory stimulation—you can’t have one without the other. This is at the core of everything we do at Brain Balance Achievement Centers. Improving motor skills, sensory detection, and processing has to come before any higher learning, either behaviorally or academically, can take place.

Motor Skills

In almost every case, children who have an imbalance in their brain and who have some learning or behavioral issue, will also have a poorly coordinated motor system. We often see they are uncoordinated, clumsy, and awkward with their gait. Motor activity involves a number of different skills, including:

• Muscle tone, strength, and coordinatio
• Rhythm and timin
• Bilateral coordinatio
• Dominanc
• Gross and fine-motor skill
• Primitive and postural reflexe
• Eye-muscle balance and coordinatio

• Vestibular balance and posture

We can improve our child motor skills by choosing kinds of toys or with simple way of play:

Play is the mechanism by which children learn—how they experience their world, practice new skills, and internalize

new ideas—and is therefore the essential “work of children”. Through this continuous and expanding process, early skills give rise to new ones and new experiences are integrated with previous ones. Through play, children learn about the world and engage in activities that encourage their cognitive, emotional, and social development.

For example, when a child bangs on a drum, she learns she can create a sound. Through play, she learns the important concept of cause and effect.

Blocks

Blocks are great toys for children of all ages. Children can explore, move, and hold blocks before beginning to stack them vertically or line them up horizontally to form simple structures or complex designs. They can select blocks of the same size or in uniformly descending sizes.

Puzzles

Offer items that fit easily inside or, to make it more complicated, just barely fit. puzzle allows children to feel a sense of success since all the cups are the same size.

To make puzzles that offer greater challenges, cut out circles or squares of different sizes in the top of a shoebox. Offer objects such as large recycled plastic jar tops, toy cars, or clothespins that just fit inside the cutouts.

Keywords: sensor motors, motor skills. Toys, play

http://www.brainbalancecenters.com/our-program/integrated-approach/sensory-motor/

https://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/201109/Using%20Toys_Guyton_Online_0911.pdf