parentstuff-need a pep talk

Gina - Deep breath...in and now out...OK.  STOP FREAKING OUT!!!  You are on the right path.  Personally I agree with your decision to work on personal skills and following directions, etc.  I think working on those things will make it easier for him to take directions on how to fine tune his motor skills.  DH is a lefty and he is always crabbing about our scissors...LOL. 

Oh how glad I am that those days are behind me.

It is a very good thing that the teacher noticed that so early.  And baseball was a great choice for goodness sakes. Don't beat yourself up over that.  My youngest, while a rightie, is a total klutz with his hands when it comes to fine motor skills, stuff like scissors and so forth, yet he can take apart extremely delicate and tiny electronic equipment, fix it and put it back together.  Not all of us have the same strengths.  Who knows?  Eli could be a Major League leftie to rival Clemons, Shilling, Cy Young.......

I agree with giving him an old catalog or mags and letting him cut and paste to his little hearts content.  And if he doesn't LIKE doing it, don't push.  After all, in the overall scheme of life, how crucial is the ability to use a pair of scissors as well as everyone else??

Another thought.....DH is a leftie, but he cuts right handed, does a ton of things right handed, so perhaps a gentle bit of encouragement to become ambidextrous?  There isn't a law written someplace that says a leftie has to do everything leftie.....

 If the teacher noticed it already, brought it up to you, and suggested things to help, that's nothing to be upset about. Be glad your son has a teacher who noticed it quickly and tried to help him, rather than hoping it would get better.

Along the lines of cutting out the cars, the big holiday toy books will be out soon enough. He might like chopping those apart to put together a list of what he hopes to get. One of the other projects I did involved cutting shapes out of construction paper to make something. In that class, we made ants to go with a story, but if he likes cars, you could do the same thing with that.

Elias will be fine - it's the 2nd day of kindergarten for pete's sake! 

IMO, if you drive, drive, drive your (collective) kids to perfection, they'll resent it later.  And they won't really be able to live up to those expectations, so the disappointments are much harder to cope with.

You're a good mom with normal kids and a supportive husband/father.  You're doing a great job!  Really!

 Hey, Gina, as others have said, don't beat yourself up.  It sounds to me like the teacher was just pointing out something that needs to be worked on, not that she was saying Elias is "failing".  Something came to mind as I was reading your post- does Eli have a lazy eye by some chance?  That will affect his fine motor skills.  As you probably all ready know, trying to teach things like scissoring to a leftie is very hard when you're a rightie (Rob is the only leftie in the family).  Someplace I saw scissors that don't have "finger holes".  Instead, they are held inside the hand, which makes it easier for kids with fine motor skill problems.  I think they can used in either hand, too.  I'll do some searching and see if I can find a link or something.

micksmom

does Eli have a lazy eye by some chance?

No...that does run in my family and Lily had one so we've been taking him to her opthamologist since last year. He has the glasses but the doc says he uses both sides normally as near as he can tell or that Elias will enable him to tell LOL. In Lily the difference was very marked and easy to spot. But he's been going to the eye doc pretty regularly and this doc did fix Lily's for which I am eternally grateful I will for sure keep close watch on him for that...just in case we missed it.

You probably didn't miss it then.  Rob has a lazy eye.  His stupid peditrician in NY didn't put anything in his records about the drift in his eye (we moved down here when he was almost one), and the drift wasn't noticable after a couple of months, so we forgot about it (dr in NY said it was normal for one eye to drift).  Long story.  Anyway, the dr here didn't pick up on it until Rob's Kindergarten screening.  We got the sight straightened out in that eye through patching the good eye.  Needless to say, we drove the peditrician crazy when Kole was a baby asking her to check his eyes all the time.  Anyhoo- glad you knew what to look for!

 I was able to find a pair of those scissors I was talking about.  They might make it easier for Eli to cut.

http://www.discountschoolsupply.com/Product/ProductDetail.aspx?product=25291&category=2589

Oh gosh Gina please doesn’t flip out.  It was suggested to me that my now, 28 years old, son be held back in pre-K and not allowed to Kindergarten because his gross motor skills were bad.  He use to run like he had a load of “crap” in his pants. LOL  I freaked out and my DH at the time said, ARE YOU CRAZY!!  He is going to Kindergarten.  He ended up a track star in high school!  Seriously.

Kindergarten is all about teaching find and gross motor skills in preparation for 1^st grade.  You child is lefty, he is going to be behind the other children!  So what?  I would work with him, but I would not freak out over the fact he is not in par wit the righties on find motor – it is difficult for lefties. 

Here are some things he can do for fun. 

Cutting junk mail, particularly the kind of paper used in magazine subscription cards.

1.      Making fringe on the edge of a piece of construction paper.

2.      Cutting play dough with scissors.

3.      Cutting straws or shredded paper.

To help with his fine motor skills have him do connect the dots and make sure he connect from left to right and top to bottom, tracing around objects.  Draw and write on a chalkboard with chalk.

Here is a site you can purchase all kinds of left handed materials, like scissors:  http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/acatalog/childrens_products.html

My 7 year old is ADD (without the hyper - thank godness) and I am always getting reports similiar to yours for something "attention" wise..  I have learned to pick what I think is important and work on it and not get overwhelmed - me nor him. 

Now go have that drink!

Gina -- you focused on FINE things this summer and this is what his grade is FOR ... to **learn** fine motor skills. 

Let him cut what interests him -- and put his stuff up.

Now -- if you really want to get inside what makes HIM tick -- get one *more* pair of lefty scissors and TEACH YOURSELF. 

If you are right-handed and he's a lefty, you will have to think *harder* about the HOW.  Much of using scissors is learning to 'squeeze' them so the blades rock onto each other rather than letting them stretch apart so the paper folds between them instead of cutting.

I'm a lefty who was FORCED to be a righty.  Now I'm an adult who can write with either hand (only well with one hand) but I always had all sorts of median-line problems and BALANCE problems because neither left nor right hand nor foot was ever 'right' for me because neither was allowed to be natural.  So I learned to cope BUT many many times since then I have learned that when a child has a tough time with something the adult needs to sit down in total private and DO that thing from the "opposite" way so you can appreciate their frustration and work out in your logical adult mind "Hmmm -- dang -- I can't seem to make it cut --ok, if I push my thumb and finger towards each other rather than just closing ... hmmm, that works better!"

It will help HIM because you're trying to see things from his frame of reference, and you'll get a feel for what is frustrating.  Things like straight lines and curves are **different** in cutting -- A curve left and a curve right?  DIFFERENT. 

That way he won't feel 'weird'.  YOU can emphathize. 

Cutting and drawing and stuff have to do with how he perceives space around him as well as fine motor activity.  The T-ball stuff?  You didn't screw up -- by helping him be coordinated and social, you gave him the basics so he can BE patient with himself (and with others). 

You were working on another basic skill -- one isn't more important than another and you foresaw ONE and helped him with it.  Now he has one LESS problem than he would have.  You did GOOD!

Also, my brother (a righty) cuts left handed. So maybe Elias would like to cut better right-handed? It's worth a shot (so long as he doesn't cut a finger off...)

Interesting. I just had him cut some stuff and he wanted to use BOTH hands to cut...lol. Like loppers, one hand on each half of the scissors. He also told me "maybe you should go to the living room or something" because he didn't want me to see him...hmm. he's self concious I suppose. I didn't leave...stayed right there and we cut out 4 car pics...he did okay but seemed to forget each time he put the scissors down, how to repick them up..lol. Oy...

I asked Lily as she says "cutting is hard...especially when you want to cut small things, I am not good at cutting..." so yeah I don't think I'll obsess too much about the scissors. But we will work on telling folks to go away...haha!

Lefty scissors look just like righty scissors except the small hole for the thumb and the big hole for the other four fingers are reversed. The scissors they use for little kids have holes the same size so they can be used with either hand. I doubt if he's "light years" behind ... the teacher is just trained to notice little things. My best friends youngest son had small motor difficulties when he started school (he's 27 now) and she got him interested in beading and had him start keyboarding as soon as he knew his letters.  He improved dramatically and it didn't hinder him in the least bit.

Joyce

 Gina, about the not remembering how to pick up the scissors. I have that sometimes using pencils. When I was young, I wrote with both hands. In about 2nd grade, I was told to be only right handed. There were times though that I could not figure out how to hold the pencil right handed, and I could only write left handed.

If there's a real problem, or you don't see him improving, you can always ask that the school evaluate him for occupational therapy. I probably should have been, instead of having teachers just tell me to write neater.

 Gina I've read the other posts and know you are feeling better but just want to state again that kids learn things at different rates and develop physically at different rates.

For example, my two oldest nephews are now grown but they have hit every hallmark at different times.  Specific to this thread the oldest had incredible fine motor skills but apalling gross motor skills when he went to school - I recall teaching him how to climb and jump and get off things.

The other one had apalling fine motor skills but could scale anything. They both did fine and it all evened out over time.

Oh and males generally develop fine motor skills later than females

Gina…. Ok, so I don’t have any advice over the fine motor skills improving except just through practice, but I will tell you a story.  I work in Physical Rehab as a therapist with a whole team of therapists that work on fine and gross motor skills and cognitive and speech issues.   

One of our Physical therapists came to work one day just besides herself about the fact that her little boys started stuttering.  She just KNEW in her head that he would end up needing Speech Therapy. The speech therapists and the rest of us on the team tried to talk her down and to reassure her that this didn’t necessarily mean anything.  The speech therapist told her that if it continued she could give her some exercises to work on with him….but she didn’t want to do it yet because she didn’t want her to focus on the stuttering and get herself worked up that there was a problem and to try to fix something that wasn't broken.

Well within 2 months there was no issue. No therapy or intervention needed and now she can laugh about her fears.
 

You are being the same way…. This is something that will likely resolve itself and Children mature at different rates anyway.

My suggestion is to just do some practice. Get some left handed scissors for him and work on cutting out fun shapes and objects for 10 minutes a few nights a week. He likely won’t need it, but it will make you at least feel like you are helping him and I bet in a couple months, the fine motor scissor cutting problems will have been resolved. all will likely be just fine!