ALL SYSTEMS GO
Hand-eye coordination is a vital skill. Learn how to hone it.
How long does it take you to thread a needle, manoeuvre the pram through a crowd or cut out letters for scrapbooking? Each of these tasks relies on the ability of your visual system to use the information it receives from the eyes to guide your hands in order to execute the task. Your visual system relies on the eyes to be able to see the correct visual details. They need to work as a team to provide information from each visual field that, in turn, gives us an accurate picture. If this doesn’t happen, the information from each eye may provide a picture that doesn’t fit together properly. This will lead to confusion, and the brain will suppress some of the information to make sense of what it is seeing. The eyes need to be able to adjust their focus near and far and aim on the visual target in an accurate way.
The hands need to have adequate muscle strength, agility of movement and muscle tone in order to work efficiently. Muscle tone is the resistance found in muscles when they are resting. It needs to be high enough to resist the force of gravity and low enough not to hinder movement.
The brain needs to synchronise the information it is getting visually and what it is feeling through movement in order to master hand-eye coordination. This is a skill your child will use to pick up her toys, feed herself finger food, stack blocks or shovel sand into a bucket. Between 4 and 8 months, your baby will learn to reach and grasp large objects. By 10 months she’ll be able to pick objects up between her pointer finger and thumb. Your child needs opportunities to practise and refine her hand-eye coordination so that she can master school demands such as tracing, cutting out worksheets, writing, tying her shoelaces, and so on. Give your child art materials, construction toys, puzzles, balls, musical instruments and dress-up dolls to play with, and provide opportunities to stir porridge or squirt sauce onto a plate. These activities help develop her handeye coordination. ●