This is a list of terms used on the website that may need additional explanation
Coordination Skills: Using your arms and legs to work together effectively. This skill is required in everyday tasks from dressing, brushing your teeth to playing sport.
Motor Planning: Think about catching a moving ball! This requires timing the movement, predicting the ball’s speed and direction and reacting to the ball by moving the body and arms in an appropriate response.
Sequencing: This is the ability to carry out two or more movements in a smooth and coordinated manner. This can range from gross motor games such as hop scotch to fine motor skills such as handwriting.
Bilateral Coordination: ability to use both sides of the body together in a coordinated way. Both sides could be doing the same thing together such as jumping with two feet (symmetrical movement): coordinating two different movements at the same time such as cutting with scissors (assymetrical movement) or taking turns to do the same movement such as pedalling a bike (alternating movement).
Dominance: This is when one side of the body spontaneously carries out the primary task such as the foot used to kick a ball, the hand used to hold a pen or the hand used to feed a thread through a bead. Crossing the midline and trunk rotation is an important precursor to establishing dominance.
Midline Crossing: This is when one hand moves across to the other side of the body to reach, grasp and/or carry out a task there. A right handed person standing at a chalkboard reaches over to the left side to pick up a piece of chalk and write a sentence from the left side of his body over to the right side of his body.
Eye-hand Coordination: Using your eyes to guide your hands to complete a planned movement.
Tactile Awareness: This is the ability to recognise size, shape or weight of objects without using vision.
Fine Motor skills: This involves the muscles in the hand and forearm used to control the movement of the hand and fingers for precise movement. Precise movement of muscles is also needed for sticking your tongue out to catch a snowflake or twitching your nose to mimic the twitching nose of a mouse but for the purpose of this site it will refer to the muscles of the hand.
Core Stability: This involves the back and tummy muscles which when engaged will provide a solid base of support from which the arms and legs are free to move with precision and control! Core stability is important for smooth and fluid movement when carrying out gross motor skills and is helpful in maintaining a good sitting posture for table top tasks.
Visual Perception: Is the ability to interpret what we see.
Form Constancy: This is the ability to recognise forms and objects as the same in any position, size or environment.
Position in Space: The ability to perceive the relationship of an object to yourself and/or relationship of self to others.
Visual Closure: Ability to identify incomplete figures when only fragments are presented. It is dependant on prerequisite perceptual skills, such as visual memory. Poor visual closure may impact on letter formation for handwriting.
Visual Discrimination: Ability to discriminate dominant features in different objects eg. position in space, shape, colour and size.
Visual Figure Ground: This is the ability to distinguish objects and shapes from their background. It involves being able to detect subtle differences in shape, texture and colour.
Visual Form Constancy: Looks at the child’s ability to identify shapes or objects which are the same, even when their size, shape, orientation has changed.
Visual Memory: Ability to recall all characteristics of a given form previously seen. May be long term or short term.
Visual Sequential Memory: Ability to remember immediately a series of forms previously seen in the correct sequence.
Visual Motor Integration: The ability to recognise, discriminate and interpret visual stimuli and to co-ordinate this visual information with motor output, for precise visual guidance of movement.
If there are any terms used on this site that you need clarification on please do contact me at info@handrighting.com. I would love to hear from you!
