ActEi - Co-ordination & Laterality

Children with poor coordination or laterality may appear clumsy and look awkward when playing or running. They will generally find catching awkward and playing racket games difficult. In the classroom they often have poor handwriting and may read and write some of their numbers and letters back-to-front.

Children with poor co-ordination may:

• Be unable to identify one dominant hand - ambidextrous but lacking skill
• Have difficulties in coordinating their movements, 'two left feet'
• Struggle to track the movement of a ball, especially when they have to catch it
• Have to exert a lot of effort in their fine motor skills to achieve accuracy
• Read or write with a book to one side of their body
• Have problems with fine motor skills (writing, scissors, tying shoe laces)
• Find hand-eye tracking difficult - writing and reading tasks will require a lot of effort

Using combinations of hand-eye, homolateral and cross lateral techniques, the ActEi games in this book aim to reduce the impact of poor coordination, and improve left and right coordination, laterality, awareness of dominant and non-dominant hands, coordination of the whole body and fine motor skills.