Exercises for Ocular Motor Skills

What are ocu­lar motor skills & why are they important?

Ocu­lar motor skills are basi­cal­ly just watch­ing things with our eyes. Lyn­nae Glas­cock, a pedi­atric occu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pist with Quin­cy Med­ical Group, dis­cuss­es why these skills are impor­tant for kids to learn.

We use this skill all day long, with­out even real­iz­ing it. For exam­ple, when throw­ing and hit­ting a ball, you have to be able to watch it. When a child is in school, their eyes will move between the board and their paper. When we read, our eye coor­di­nate from left to right then to the next line on a page with­out skip­ping any parts of a word, whole words, or sen­tences, but some kids skip entire para­graphs, and they have no idea that they are doing it. Lat­er in life, we use this skill when dri­ving. Our eyes are look­ing at the road, then at a road sign, then back to check the speedome­ter, and then our eyes go back onto the road again. These real­ly impor­tant skills for kids to learn at an ear­ly age so they can build on them as they develop.

Exer­cis­es for devel­op­ing ocu­lar motor skills:

Baby:

One of the best things you can do is to grab a rat­tle. Have the baby lay down and you lie over the top of them, shake the rat­tle, and move in a cross-like pat­tern nice and slow. You can do an X or a cir­cle and bring it towards their nose because we want their eyes to come in just a lit­tle bit as well.

Toddler/​Preschooler:

FInd a ball (larg­er than a ten­nis ball or soft­ball). Roll the ball towards the child and have them catch or hit the ball. The key is to have them watch the ball. To get their atten­tion, you would want to say, ​“Hey John­ny. Look here at this ball. Look here first.” Have them watch it all the way from your hands, all the way to their hands, and then when they throw back, same thing, mak­ing sure they’re look­ing at that ball.

Old­er kids:

Con­tin­ue to prac­tice throw­ing, catch­ing, and hit­ting the ball, but use some­thing more like a ten­nis ball or a light-up ball, to make sure that you keep their focus.

If you notice that your child is hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty with read­ing, copy­ing from the board, catch­ing or hit­ting a ball, they may need occu­pa­tion­al ther­a­py ser­vices. Talk to your child’s pedi­a­tri­cian or give us a call at 217−222−6550 exten­sion 3418 with any questions.