Activity: Drawing a piece of knitting

Another fine motor activity that we made up the other day. I suggested to my son we draw a piece of knitting together. Sounds dull, but not necessarily so. I wanted an activity that required drawing lots of tiny lines for my own brain as much as his.

We both choose two different coloured gel pens. He drew a rectangle to indicate a scarf. I asked him to decide a pattern and nominate who should do how many lines. Then we took turns replicating his pattern with very simple straight lines to indicate a stitch.

Half way down the rectangle he requested we choose different pens and he redesigned the colour sequence. By the last few rows of the piece of knitting depicted his lines had become very neat and careful.

Becuase this was an inclusive activity and we took turns and he decided how things should look he remained engaged and ultimately very satisfied with the end result.

Sharing the burden works very well with children who have output issues because they fatigue quickly, but will remain engaged if they know a pause is due to them.

This activity also helps reinforce the notion of patterns and be able to recognize them.

I think the next pattern exercise we'll try may involve drawing guitar chords because he's interested in music. It could almost be like composition and then afterwards we could try to play the chords and see how they sound in reality.

Even though there's little evidence to suggest that repeatedly practising fine motor will necessarily fix or wildly improve written output trouble, I think it helps the child to feel like they can concentrate for a sustained period of time on something that involves precise fine motor work. It's all about the process for us right now and feeling capable rather than dejected and so the actual fine motor activity needs to be incidental to something else that's happening. In the above example he was overseeing what went on the page and directing operations.

It's interesting because previously I had much less success trying to get him to draw hockey shirts with numbers on the back. So you can imagine my surprise to see the replication of a piece of knitting proved more successful. Maybe because it was more abstract.

Victory: Knitting

My child had asked me to purchase a knitting book that came with two needles and a ball of wool from the bookclub sheet they bring home once a month from school. At the time I considered the 9 dollars a dubious investment, but agreed to it because I figured if he only ever used it three times it would pay off because knitting is an intense fine motor task.
Yesterday it arrived. Initially it was a bit of a disaster until I sat and we did it together. The needles are handy dandy because they are wooden, a bit pencil like. Eventually after six rows he assumed responsibility for the needles and I did the part where you wrap the wool around for him.
“It’s teamwork,” he remarked at one point. “All kids should do this with their mothers.” I will confess to an ache in the arm region because in order to help him I had to wrap my arm across his back, over the shoulder type arrangement. But the great victory was the delight at seeing what really was a modest 3×3 square of knitting emerge. It certainly wasn’t easy nor independent but it felt like a small victory because initially he felt it so impossible.
The set we used was a French one: called Tricot Minute. It’s a book, two wooden needles and a ball of wool. I will try to hunt down a link and place it here. I think the type of needles you use will make a huge difference to it. Fat, wooden ones if poss. Bonne Chance.