Gross Motor Skills Quotes

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.

Coonskin caps and silly putty were just not going to cut it anymore. The good mother got her kids toys that were educational, that advanced gross and fine motor skills, that gave them the spatial sensibilities and design aptitude of Frank Lloyd Wright, and that taught Johnny how to read James Joyce at age three. God forbid that one second should pass where your child was idle and that you were not doing everything you could to promote his or her emotional, cognitive, imaginative, quantitative, or muscular development.

look at your child next time he is watching television and ask yourself what he is doing—or, better yet, what he is not doing. , the child is not: • Scanning • Practicing motor skills, gross or fine • Practicing eye-hand coordination • Using more than two senses • Asking questions • Exploring • Exercising initiative or motivation • Being challenged • Solving problems • Thinking analytically • Exercising imagination • Practicing communication skills • Being either creative or constructive

Yet somehow, in recent years educational theory has come to reject repetition as a good educational tool when it comes to mastering our multiplication tables or identifying geographic locations or learning the correct spelling of words. We accept that to be good at sports or music you must practice over and over until your fine motor skills become your gross motor skills, meaning that you can play Tchaikovsky in your sleep! Over-practice implies enough repetition to make new skills seem easy and natural. Yet contemporary educational philosophies consider large amounts of rote practice to be unnecessary in academics. And so our modern educational system is weak. The purpose of a classical education is to strengthen one’s mind, body, and character in order to develop the ability to learn anything.

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks.

For example, if healthy 30-year-olds are sleep deprived for six days (averaging, in this study, about four hours of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60-year-old. And if they are allowed to recover, it will take them almost a week to get back to their 30-year-old systems. Taken together, these studies show that sleep loss cripples thinking in just about every way you can measure thinking. Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge. Eventually, sleep loss affects manual dexterity, including fine motor control, and even gross motor movements, such as the ability to walk on a treadmill.

MILD HYPOTHERMIA Mild hypothermia has been termed by some experts as “a case of the umbles”: the patient typically first stumbles, then fumbles, grumbles, and later, mumbles. As gross motor skills are affected a stumbling gait begins. Fine motor skills decrease and give rise to fumbling. The patient begins to draw inward, becoming less and less sociable. Designed to function optimally at approximately 98.6 degrees F (37 degrees C), the brain will begin to malfunction when its temperature drops below the ideal. In the case of hypothermia, normal thought processes become impaired. Mild hypothermia could be termed “mild stupidity.” Patients begin to make poor decisions, such as not putting on rain gear when rain begins to fall. Patients typically show increasing confusion and apathy. Fine shivering, relatively controllable by the patient, begins. A healthy sign, shivering is the body’s involuntary form of exercise to increase core heat. But mild hypothermia is insidious, affecting the ability of the patient to think, to be aware of its onset, to take care of self. When the brain first senses heat loss is gaining on heat production, it stimulates the primary defense mechanism against further heat loss—vasoconstriction of the peripheral circulation (shrinking of the blood vessels in the skin). This vasoconstriction dramatically slows blood flow to the surface of the skin, where it will lose heat into the surrounding environment. The lack of blood causes the skin to become pale and cool. BMR will increase in response to the threat of cold, with an accompanying increase in heart rate and respiratory rate.

Eventually I was ready to learn how to perform routine life tasks again. 'Enabling occupation'—that’s what the learning process was called when it was presented to me. Enabling occupation involved the mastery of skills that I didn’t even know could properly be called 'skills.' How to pick up and carry and manipulate a set of common objects: a handbag, a stoneware saucer, a mobile phone, a paperback book. I was told that my new limbs were capable of hefting an automobile, of bending an iron bar, but I couldn’t make them do any of these magical things—not anything remotely close. Instead, I spent my days trying to pick up a thumbtack from a hard surface using my feeble pincer grasp, to activate a light switch with a single articulated finger, and to fasten a long line of shirt buttons, each of which was around the size of a half-dollar coin. During this period, I worked to improve my gross motor skills in parallel. I relearned how to reach for distant objects without collapsing under my own weight, how to twist a standard brass doorknob, and how to pour liquid from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup without spilling everything everywhere or crushing the handle itself in my grip. Eventually I used these newfound skills to practice clothing myself in simple blouses with velcro fasteners and pants with elastic waistbands, struggling to take it all off again when it was time. At some point during this phase, a team of nameless staff members helped me stand upright in front of a full-length mirror so I could stare at my newly-made body, fully exposed, and with my sharpened vision I was able to see the true extent of my transformation, the exquisite atrocity I’d chosen to perpetrate.

Thus, a simple set of skills, combined with an emphasis on actions requiring complex and gross motor muscle operations (as opposed to fine-motor control), all extensively rehearsed, allows for extraordinary performance levels under stress.

Perceptual motor therapy provides integrated movement experiences that remediate gross-motor, fine-motor, and visual discrimination problems. Activities, including sensory-input techniques, stimulate left/right brain communication to help the child interpret incoming information to the nervous system. Goals are to develop more mature patterns of response to specific stimuli, improve motor skills and balance, and stimulate alternate routes to memory and sequencing for those children who do not respond to the methods taught in the conventional classroom.