In-hand manipulation is the ability to move objects around in your hand, and there are three components.

• Translation: The ability to move an object from the palm of the hand to the finger tips and back to the palm.
• Shift: The linear movement of an object between the fingers such as moving your fingers up and down the shaft of a pencil.
• Rotation: The movement of an object with the finger around one or more of its axis, such as when you spin a pencil around with your fingers.

Occupational therapy intervention:

Writing Practice and Graphing:

Roll the fruit dice and color dice. Use the grid and find the junction on the grid to see what letter or word you have to write. Write your word, feed the Munchy Ball the fruit, and graph the type of fruit.

Number Graphing:

Roll a fruit dice and a number dice. Feed the ball that number of fruit. If you roll the bird, he eats the fruit so that you have to take on of the fruit out. You could graph the type of fruit that you get in each turn

To add in-hand manipulation, you pick up all of the fruit one at a time in one hand, then feed the ball one at a tie with one hand.

Fruit munching:

Roll the dice, pick up one of that fruit and put it in your hand. Roll the dice again and pick up one of that fruit. Keep going until you have five pieces of fruit in one hand. Now you can feed the Munchy Ball your fruit one at a time moving the fruit from your palm to your fingers.

To add an extra challenge, I like to keep track of the fruit in the hand and randomly call out which type of fruit they have to feed the ball. That way they are not feeding the easiest one, but have to work the hand to get the right type of fruit.

Color sorting Paper Bowl with colored small bowls:

Roll the fruit dice and color dice. Pick up the number of the correct kind of fruit and move it to the right color of fruit bowl.

You can choose when to feed the Munchy Ball once you have finished putting the fruit into the color spots.

Fine Motor balance tree:

It is great to work on fine motor control away from the body, as that gives more of a challenge to the muscle control. You have to have control and coordination to balance and stack small objects onto a surface.  The game scatterpillar scramble, and wanted to make a similar motor activity that in multiple ways.

It easy to use to match colors, so printed colors at the right intervals on a piece of paper and made a tube out of the paper. Then put colored craft sticks through the tube to make a balance tree. The craft sticks come out of all sides of the tube, and match the colored parts of the paper.

Printed the paper and then laminated it. Then cut slits at the colored areas large enough to slide the craft sticks all the way through to the part on the other side of the tube. Then added Velcro hook and loop to the long ends of the paper in order to be able to hold the tube together, but make it collapsible so that easily transport it.

To  use the mini fruit munchy ball food to place in the “tree” and have the kids roll either a color dice or a fruit dice that made to see what they needed to get out of the tree. To make it harder, have the kids get the fruit out of the tree with tongs or training chopsticks and then they have to feed the fruit to the Munchy Ball.  Also put letters onto the craft sticks and have the kids write the letter that was on the stick they got the fruit from. It helps them work on memory as they feed the munchy ball and then they have to remember their letter to write it down (or a word that starts with that letter. The kids really enjoy the balancing and novelty of the balance tree.

To use the dinosaur putty pets to balance in the “tree”. They are harder to balance so it is a little bit more of a challenge. It is very similar to the save the dinosaurs activity, but stacked up in a tree.