Monthly Archives: January 2014

The Shoe Tying Club

shoetyingTeaching shoe tying is often not prioritized these days due to the advent of velcro and slip on shoes. Due to the frustrations experienced by their children, many parents tend to choose the easy way out buying shoes that do not require tying. Fast forward a year or two, parents find themselves frantically tying their second grader’s shoes on the sidelines of a soccer game or just before the bus. These parents are silently berating themselves for having given in earlier and are hoping for a miracle. First and second grade teachers are similarly frustrated when children arrive in their classroom lacking a skill that should have been learned in kindergarten. Deb Vozel, an intervention specialist at Cline Elementary School in Centerville, OH decided she needed to do something about it. Together with Bhanu Raghavan, OTR/L she started a shoe tying club to coach any second grader lacking shoe tying skills. The club turned out to be a resounding success!

Shoe tying club met during the second quarter of school. The club members were chosen by their classroom teachers, and included both typical and children with special needs. The steps used for shoe-tying came from the poster One-Two Tie Your Shoe. This poster was adapted from the book Self-Care with Flair! The club members were placed in groups of four to five. They met daily before the end of their morning session. Mrs. Vozel and her aide led the club daily with weekly consultation from the OT. Club members practiced a few steps each week. Once a step was mastered they were introduced to the subsequent step. If a child had a particular difficulty with mastering a step the OT helped to break the steps down even further (activity analysis). At the end of the second quarter all the club members were successfully tying their shoes. Mrs. Vozel celebrated their success by giving each member a certificate and a copy of the poster One-Two Tie Your Shoe.

The nine easy steps in One-Two Tie Your Shoe are a convenient and quick way to teach this skill to any child. The laminated poster can be displayed in the classroom, on the refrigerator at home, in day-care centers and wherever young children are learning to tie their shoes.

Therapies in the School 2013

The November 21-22 Therapies in the School conference, sponsored by Education Resources, Inc., in Framingham, MA, was an incredibly constructive time for therapists to learn and share the latest in evidence-based strategies, select appropriate assessment tools and assistive technology, apply best practices in team collaboration…and much, much more!

As the Therapro rep, it was fun to talk with many therapists about tools they like and how they use them in their school-based practices.

Here are some popular materials that therapists loved and recommended:

Check them out on the Therapro website to see if they could be useful in your practice!

From all accounts, this was a very fruitful conference for attendees, who walked away on Friday afternoon after a full two days of listening, learning, discussion, and networking.

– Filomena Connor, MS, OTR/L
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