To OT, or Not to OT

In order to give Noah's fine motor skills a little more practice, we got to cutting, pasting, writing, and drawing this week.  As you can see, once I got Noah started he did not want to stop.  He completed three pictures and kept right on writing afterwards.

I had Noah practice writing his name with lower-case letters for a change.  I hear kindergarten teachers say that is one of the first bad habits they try to break - kids writing their names in all caps.

Anna is so intrigued by anything involving arts and crafts and paper and writing utensils.  The scissors were a trial for her, but for her first time ever, I say the fumbling exploration and erratic snips were a HUGE success. :)

We did a "taste test" of pencil grips this week, too.  The one in the middle is the newest one I just bought online, and it helped greatly!  Even better, Noah responded enthusiastically to using the other two which we've had for awhile but just haven't been using regularly.  I was so pleased to see Noah better able to make smaller letters and space them less wildly across the page when he used these grips.

This week, I also took Noah to see that Occupational Therapist I mentioned I contacted last week.  She offered a free consultation to us and I jumped at the appointment.  It turns out that, between Noah and me, the only one that needs therapy, is me.  She knew pretty quickly that Noah's writing/grasp struggles are nowhere near severe enough to warrant needing OT and the things she saw that needed correction were easily addressed with several tips and techniques I can work with him on.  I was surprised to note, too, that nothing she recommended was new information to me; I'd read or heard all those tricks and things to consider in my own research on this stuff, so I guess going forward I can just trust my own google skills to guide us. Ha!  (Elizabeth, I grinned to myself when the very first thing she did after observing his "index grasp" was that teeny, tiny crayon tip trick you emailed me about!)

Anyway, bring on kindergarten.  We are raring and apparently ready to go!