Eye Hand Coordination Activities

In this video, NAPA paediatric occupational therapist Jonathan shares hand-eye coordination activities and tips for parents and children to try at home. If you prefer text, we have the video transcribed for you below. Have fun!

Today we’re going to talk about hand-eye coordination.

So, hand-eye coordination is your ability to coordinate what you’re seeing with the neural pathways that are responsible for motor movement in our hands. Growing up playing sports, I did a lot of activities to work on hand-eye coordination and I’m going to share some of those with you today.

First, being able to dribble and catch a ball.

I love integrating this with rings with our kids because it’s a nice visual, precise target that they can focus on to integrate. Basically, I’m going to dribble 3 times into each ring.

Our next activity is for our little ones.

This is an activity based on fine motor precision, which is your ability to coordinate a precise motor moment based on a precise target. So, in this case, it’s a bead. This is a great activity for parents to create fun bracelets with their kids. Basically, you’re just threading the bead through and working on being able to integrate those systems together.

Our last one involves stickers and an unstable surface.

So, at home, you can use a pillow or anything that’s wobbly. I’m going to stand on top of here, and I have these cool Minnie Mouse stickers. Basically, you can do scrapbook making on here so the child has a precise target for where they have to peel off the sticker and then turn to place the sticker on the scrapbook, or ball, or whatever the precise target may be.

That’s a great way to work on multiple things.

In addition to hand-eye coordination, you can also work on balance and reaching outside of your base for support.

Watch more NAPA videos here and more activities here!