Upper Body and Core Strength Fun Deck

Make moving your muscles fun while building vital upper body and core strength muscles.

Do you want to improve your child’s trunk and upper body strength, hand use, and manipulation skills? Use the Upper Body and Core Strength Fun Deck to teach controlled use and stability of a child’s trunk, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hands, and fingers.

These skills build an important foundation to help children complete everyday tasks successfully. The content cards present a developmental progression of movements (unilateral and bilateral) focusing on trunk and shoulder use, coordination activities, and fine motor skills.

This Upper Body and Core Strength Fun Deck includes 52 double-sided cards. The card front presents an upper body activity with a large picture illustration, and the other side describes the movement activity with a smaller picture. It also includes four additional content cards providing game ideas, instructions, and a list of activities.  

Upper body muscles have an impact on the fine motor tasks such as handwriting.

Children need efficient control of the larger muscle groups in the neck, shoulder and trunk is necessary to maintain stability for the fingers and hands to move to complete the handwriting task.  As children develop, control and stability begins at the trunk, progressing to the elbow, wrist and finally the hand.  With normal development, fine motor skills are developed from gross motor skills.

Children also must develop the ability to plan and execute gross motor skill actions.  With handwriting tasks, this motor planning requires muscle groups to work together with the proper force, timing and actions to produce an acceptable outcome (ie legible handwriting).  For example, in order to write with a pencil, the brain has to plan and carry out the skill in the correct sequence.  Starting with the pectoral muscles, the trapezius and the rhomboid muscles coactivating with the proper force and timing to stabilize the shoulder in order for the fingers and hand to move the pencil along the paper efficiently.   Children with decreased motor planning skills exhibit poor legibility of handwriting compared to their peers.

Hand-eye coordination skills require the vision system to coordinate the information received through the eyes to control, guide, and direct the hands in the accomplishment of a given task.  Again, this direction requires the gross motor movements of reaching and grading the control of the arm.

Ages 5+

Product Code: FD106