How to Use a Metronome to Increase Attention, Coordination and Motor Planning {Guest Post}

What a privilege to have another guest blogger with us today at Your Kids OT! I feel like I am a student constantly learning from others and love reading what other OTs are doing in their practice!  Today on the blog, I would like to introduce Casey who is an occupational therapist whom I "met" on Instagram! She shares so many creative ideas! Today, Casey shares with us "how to use a metronome to increase attention, coordination and motor planning".  Be sure to follow the links through to her you-tube videos which provide a great demonstration of her activity suggestions here! 

Have you used a metronome in your OT practice? Have you considered using it in the classroom or at home?

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Wanting to increase coordination, attention and motor planning for your kids? Have you tried using a digital metronome to help with this?

Let me tell you how!

A metronome is used for keeping beat.  It is often used in music for helping a musician maintain tempo.  Today I want to share with you how it can be used in therapy, at home or in your classroom! To demonstrate the many ways to use it, I downloaded a metronome app on my ipad.  You can access it for free here.

The metronome creates a beat.  This beat can be utilized at various speeds providing auditory input for the neurological system to process.  Creating a sensorimotor activity that uses the beat (clapping on beat, stomping a foot on beat, bouncing a ball against the wall on beat) causes the brain to process and communicate messages between multiple senses  It makes the brain process all of the messages passing through to get in rhythm! Think about listening to a teacher, taking notes, while maintaining posture in a chair. Or listening to your coach tell you how to adjust your stance, while holding bat in proper position in the batter's box and readying yourself for the next pitch.  Multiple avenues of brain communication are needed to complete these tasks in congruence.  What better way to exercise the attention, focus and motor needed to do this than to add some rhythmic auditory input.

Here are some examples:

• Line Jumps - This involves jumping forward, backward or sideways.  You can have your child try to land on target lines or have them land between the lines as I had this child do in my demonstration.  With each jump, the child should be landing on the beat.  I recommend starting between 50-60 bpm (beats per minute) when trying out the metronome for the first time.  You can adjust speeds later to increase the challenge.  In this example, I used 56 bpm and you can check it out here.
• Figure 8s - There are lots of great sources out there sharing how the lazy 8 is a great brain gym activity.  I love to use it in therapy as it helps to integrate right and left side brain communication.  You can use the metronome to have your child walk the figure 8 while clapping, marching or doing cross crawls to the metronome beat.  This can be challenging, but also lots of fun!
• Cross Crawls - This activity incorporates good communication between right and left sides of the brain.  It is a great activity I use regularly to help with warming up the body/brain and facilitating coordination.  Adding in the metronome increases the challenge and allows for even more brain communication with all the senses.  You can start with your child touching opposite hand to opposite knee on beat while marching.   Then you can increase challenge with opposite elbow to opposite knee! You can do this one behind the back with arms out to the sides, and bringing opposite toe up to opposite hand behind your back.  You may want to practice this one first before adding the metronome! You can see a demo of this by clicking here.

• Ball Drops - This activity involves dropping a ball on a target in rhythm.  This can be graded in so many ways with different size balls or location of target.  you can have a child passing a ball, bouncing it off a wall or many other ideas.
• Reading charts - With this activity you will simply have your child read charts to you.  You can adjust the pattern they read such as horizontal, vertical, right to left, top to bottom, etc.  You can use pictures, letters, numbers or shapes.  I have also used arrows and had the students clap their hands in the direction of the arrows on beat while stating the direction (up, down, right, left) to increase body awareness.  This is a great activity to include some academics  (pictures, letters, numbers, shapes) and you can check out my demo here.
  
• Step ups - This is a good one to add other motor tasks (clapping, reading charts) or adjust temp to have the child respond and adjust their speed to stay on beat.  You can have your child do it up/down in forward direction (see photo) or you can also have them go side to side if you have a single step.
• Clapping - In this activity I have the child listen closely and adjust to the beat as I increased or decreased the beats per minute.  This is a great exercise to practice attention, focus and motor planning.

• Dealing cards - Now of course I had to come up with a few fine motor activities that could incorporate the metronome.  Dealing cards is a great bilateral skill that you can have do to hep build fine motor control and helper hand stability.  You can check out my demo of this activity with the metronome here.
• Making dots/poke art - I like this activity for your kids who are needing some good fine motor control practice. They can work to stay on the boundary and stay in rhythm like in this demo! In addition to this idea, you can also do poke art which requires you to use a picture on a cork board and poke holes into the lines of the image with a push pin, which is another fantastic task that includes fine motor control and hand strength.  Supervision of course is required when having a child try poke art.
•  Hammering - I have enjoyed the posts from FundaNoodle using the activity I can Pound which includes fine motor coordination and bilateral skills for hammering.  This made me think of those hammering toys as well that my daughter has.  I decided to share this idea with using the metronome and hammering on beat.  You can increase difficulty by having children follow a color pattern and hammer on beat. You can see a demonstration here.
  
• Hop-scotch- This activity is another that can include academics with numbers, letters, shapes, words, etc.  It also encourages single leg and two foot jumping which is a great gross motor coordination skill.  If your child can't do single leg jumps yet, you can also do feet together on single blocks and feet apart on double blocks (also called straddle jumps).  This is a great introductory way to start working on the motor skill for jumping jacks (which is another activity you can do with a metronome!! Side note: When I teach kids jumping jacks, I slow the beat down really slow so they won't rush through.  We practice quality movement first and then increase the speed! Takes a little more patience, but it is fun and the kids enjoy the final outcome!) Check out my hopscotch demonstration here.
  
• Leg jumps - You can do running man (same arm and same leg and switch on beat) or contra-lateral skier (opposite arm opposite leg forward and switch on beat).  These are great for increasing right and left brain communication and coordination.
  

What I love about this - is it is so easy to implement! This is not just an idea for therapists! Parents, teachers, paras... anyone working with kids YOU can try this too.  I love implementing these activities for brain gym/brain breaks to stimulate the body and brain! They would be great activities to do during the school day or before homework! I hope this inspires you and gives you a fresh idea to implement in your home school or therapy session!

Ready to Grow - Casey

About Me:
I’m Casey. I am a pediatric occupational therapist working in the school system. I have a passion for helping people and sharing ideas for those who are nurturing children everywhere!  My blog OTandGrowWithMe is a place I like to share ideas for parents, teachers, therapists and those who are so lucky to get to play, learn and and grow alongside the children in their lives!

Visit my website: www.otandgrowwithme.wordpress.com
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