Testing Tuesday - Fine Motor

Whenever you are doing an assessment, you need to ask yourself "What am I testing?"

This is especially true for children with fine motor problems.

Children with fine motor problems often have trouble with pencil and paper tests.  Their printing skills are often not legible enough to read or is so labour intensive that it would take them a long time to finish a test.

Children with fine motor issues need a different way to show their learning.

One way to show learning is by doing cut and paste activities.  If their cutting skills are not good, make sure the pieces they need are already cut for them.

Remember, the skill you are assessing.

  

In this case, it's the beginning blend, bl.  Can they find words that start with the sound?   You are not assessing their cutting or pasting skills.

In this case, the skill being assessed is whether or not the child can count a certain number of items.  It doesn't matter how well the shamrocks are coloured in.  If the child can't colour at all, use a bingo dabber and have the child dab the correct number of items.

Here we want to know if the child can count the objects and put the correct number beside it.  This activity does not require the child to be able to print the number.   Remember, we are testing whether they know how to count how many items there are and if they can identify the correct number.  We are not testing if they know how to "print" a particular number.

 This activity shows us if they know what number is missing in a given sequence.  Again, no printing required.

This is an excellent activity for a bingo dabber.  Dab the correct answer to show mastery of the skill.

Cut and paste activities can take many forms and can cover a wide variety of skills.

Using manipulatives are also useful when testing children.  In this activity, the children are showing they can count by two's without having to print the numbers.  Velcro helps keep the tiles in place.

Use cubes or other manipulates to show number concepts.  They are easier to pick up.

Add cubes to paper type games so the children have something to hold on to when picking them up.  Papers that are flat on the table can be hard to grasp. 

I hope I've given you few ideas about how you can remove fine motor problems from your testing situations.