 My name is Christina Armstrong. I'm an occupational therapist with Edmonton Catholic Schools. In the classroom we work on a lot of movement skills. We try to build independent skills with children, expanding their their muscle control, and being able to pay attention so that they can basically learn their elbows. Can everyone show me where your elbows are? Show me your elbows. One of the examples of strategies that we often use is using a variety of positions to build motor coordination. So we might have children lying on their stomachs to be doing drawing, we might have them standing to be doing painting or drawing, or even just doing different activities throughout the day that they would be doing normally, but we would have them in different positions while they do it. In the classroom we do a lot of actions to books. So throughout all the books that you're reading in a typical day it's easy for teachers to add a movement into something they're already doing. So embedding the strategies into their regular routine is probably the easiest way to get movement into the day. We took a look at their needs and we noticed that efficiency of movement and their hand use were two main areas we wanted to focus on and they were really interested in building and bridges and construction. So we're gonna put our legs wide apart to make a bridge. So one of them was to turn our bodies into bridges so that they could understand the concept of a bridge goes over something, things go under bridges, turn their bodies into a bridge, and then also using the movement to really have to work your muscles to kind of go under and crawl under that bridge. Accomplished a lot of broad-based strategies in a really simple quick kind of activity. So you only get to use one hand. Pick which one you want. When we're working on muscle skills we can work on them with anything that the children are interested in. So coins is something that they were very motivated to play with. So basically getting them to be able to move an object within their hands, developing the small muscles of the hand that they need to do all their daily activities, but doing it in a coin activity that they seemed motivated to do. So we were working on using one hand to move coins from their palm to their fingertips and strengthening that fingertip pincer grasp that they will be using when you do writing. One of the other activities that you can see the kids doing is standing and painting by having larger canvases. We set them up so that they're going to be doing the movements that we want them to do and strengthen those muscles. So trying to find a good match between an activity and a child's motivation is usually the best way to get kids to push their own skills to the next level. So one of them was a swordfish and that was really really tight and tall and one of them was jiggly and wiggly. What was that one? Sometimes you'll see we do activities that they look like fun little games. It might look like the game we played where we turned into swordfish and then we were jellyfish. So they're tightening their bodies, they're loosening their bodies, they're tightening, they're loosening. They don't realize they're doing something that's helping them kind of regulate and calm down. And then using activities like blowing up an imaginary balloon are ways that we can teach children how to regulate their breathing. Often we use small spaces for kids who get easily overstimulated or overwhelmed and they need a little bit of a break. They're a handy little place that you can have a child go to just take some time and regain their focus. It's a great opportunity to go and spend a bit of quality one-on-one time with her, teach her a skill, work on the drawing with her and it's a little bit of a space where she can focus easier because there's less distractions. Often we'll introduce a strategy and we'll introduce it with the whole group and then we might assist that child who has difficulty completing the activity. We're helping that child to do it well but it might be something that could be done with all the class or it could be done in a small group.