Tygerberg Hills Occupational Therapy

03/11/2025

02/11/2025

💻 "Computer technology will replace handwriting." We hear it all the time! But kids still need to write in school, and for many, it’s a struggle filled with frustration and resistance. So, if handwriting seems less important, why should we care?

Let’s pause and ask: Why the frustration? What’s stopping kids from mastering a skill that seems second nature to us?

✍️ Handwriting is more than just pencil and paper — it’s a complex brain function involving visualization, memory, and sensory processing. When writing feels hard, it’s often because these foundational skills haven’t become automatic.

Starting with basic shapes lays the foundation for smooth, fluent handwriting later on. It’s about setting up kids for success one step at a time!

02/11/2025

Dexter is in training to become a qualified therapy dog. Here we learn to not just steal the toys the child is playing with 😅

02/11/2025

Shapes are fundamental to early childhood development, supporting cognitive, mathematical, and spatial reasoning skills. Learning about shapes helps children build a foundation for recognizing letters and numbers, develop problem-solving abilities through activities like shape-matching, and improve visual literacy through art and drawing.

01/11/2025

Working on a vertical surface is beneficial for building physical and cognitive skills like shoulder stability, core strength, and hand-eye coordination, which supports handwriting, reading, and other fine motor tasks. It engages larger muscles by requiring you to work against gravity, improves posture, and can enhance spatial awareness.

30/10/2025

Before the pencil, the brain needs the playground.

Children do not learn to read and write by tracing letters. They build those skills long before paper ever appears.

The foundation for literacy begins in the body. When children climb, balance, swing, crawl, twist, and jump, they are stimulating the sensory and motor systems that wire the brain for focus, working memory, self-regulation, and coordination—the core executive functions that make reading and writing possible.

Too often, we become isolated in our thinking and focused on what seems academic. We believe that tracing will make writing better, but this narrow focus leaves out the larger developmental picture. Gross motor development is equally, if not more, essential. The hands rely on the wrists, the wrists rely on the arms, and the arms rely on the shoulders and core. These proximal muscles and postural stabilizers form the foundation for fine motor control.

Learning in early childhood is a full-body experience. The body literally builds the brain through movement, sensory feedback, and repeated neural firing, not through rote drills or premature paper-based tasks. When fine motor demands are placed before the body is structurally and neurologically ready, when bones, ligaments, and neural pathways have not yet matured, frustration and compensation often replace curiosity and competence.

Physical movement activates both hemispheres of the brain, integrating motor and language networks essential for decoding, comprehension, and executive function. Studies from the University of Illinois (2022) found that children who engage in regular movement show stronger language development, attention, and reading readiness. A Head Start study further revealed that just thirty minutes of active play tied to literacy lessons significantly improved pre-reading outcomes.

Movement is not a break from learning. It is the catalyst for it. When children are given the freedom to move, explore, and play, we are not taking time away from literacy, but rather, we are building the neural architecture that makes it possible.

30/10/2025

26/10/2025

Dr. Shefali 💗

26/10/2025

🧠 When emotional regulation is missing, it’s not a discipline issue, it’s a developmental one.

📚 You wouldn’t punish a child for not knowing algebra… so why expect perfect self regulation without teaching it first?

💡 Kids need guidance, not punishment.

Emotional regulation is a skill and just like math or reading, it takes time, practice, and support to learn.

26/10/2025

Educators' view: Far from being a relic of the past, writing by hand engages multiple senses at once and strengthens cognitive abilities.

26/10/2025

Children need physical play to develop their strength, coordination, and motor skills. https://theconversation.com/four-year-olds-dont-need-to-sit-still-to-be-school-ready-261812?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook =1760681454