We’ve found over time with our daughter that lids of markers, or textas depending on where you come from, have always been a struggle due to the limited fine motor use of her affected arm. Whether it was impacting her with either a tight fist, or more recently, tight arm postures further up causing her hand to be open more with less grip function, we wanted to encourage her to have as much independence with art and craft, which she loves.
She has more control over gross motor skills and is able to place her arm in a number of positions, so I got to thinking about possible solutions that would help her to open her markers independently now that she’s changed from being too tight to too open in her hand. The solution was a combination of a couple of fairly basic DIY adaptive writing tools I guess.
In short, the solution was to add some grip to the markers, and create an actual grippy surface to rest it on while she removes the marker from the lid. I wanted it to be small, light, and easy to just grab as needed.
- Basic Modification of the Markers
Materials Needed:
– Large lid markers
– Coban (Cohesive Bandage)Firstly, we encourage her to use these large lid markers as they provide a nice big lid to help secure to open. We were still struggling a little to keep them in place if she held the lid down with her affected arm, and pulled the marker out, so the first step was to add some grip to these. I wanted an easy solution that could be easily replaced as needed, and was soft enough that it’s gentle on her skin. I raided our supplies cupboard and worked out the some rolls of coban that we had might be sufficient.
I cut some strips of coban that would cover most of the marker body and allow a couple of wraps around it. It probably wasn’t needed, but I placed a small strip of double sided tape on the lid to help get the coban going. The benefit of coban is that it grips to itself, so once it’s wrapped it stays in place pretty nicely (just apply some decent pressure to secure it on itself). If you really wanted to, you could put it on the marker body and lid – find out what works best for your child!
I got this off of Amazon, but realistically any Coban/(Cohesive Bandage) should do the job. This was available in some fun colours though and we got 6 rolls which should keep us going for a while.
That’s the first step done – this may be enough for your child to open them (we’d get our daughter to place the outside of her hand or arm on the grip and pull the lid off with her non affected hand.
We found that this wasn’t quite enough and that it still moved around on a smooth surface, so moved onto making a grippy surface for her.
- Something Grippy to lean on
Materials Needed:
– 3mm corflute board (honeycomb cardboard sheet)
– Non slip shelf/drawer lines
– Double sided tape (and glue for added stick)I initially tried just some basic silicone grip mat (the silicone sheets you can get for arts and crafts) and they worked a little, but not by themselves in our case. I then had the idea to build up something hard to attach the silicone sheet too. Initially I thought some thin timber sheeting, but thankfully saw some corflute which was lighter and easier to work with, and easy to replace as needed.
Unfortunately the shiny surface meant I couldn’t attach the silicone mat securely, so had to come up with another idea for the grip, and ended up settling on some non slip shelf/draw liner we had in the storage cupboard from previous projects. This is the grippy, flexible soft bubble type grip that you can put in drawers to stop things moving around. The benefit of this is it is textured but soft, and provides for a nice grip to help the marker stay put.
This is essentially a grippy block, so I cut up 4x 15cm by 10 cm (6″ x 4″) rectangles from the corflute to build up a small block. Double sided tape between layers, along with some craft glue, and I had a 5cm (2″) or so high block to form the base off. I did wrap some duct tape/electrical tape around the cut edges of the corflute as it did create some sharper areas that could give paper cuts, just as a precaution. From that, we want to cut two pieces of the non slip matting – one for the top, one for the bottom. Once cut, just repeat the process of securing the corflute and place double sided tape around the outside and through the centre, plus some art glue, and push on the non slip matting. Repeat the process for top & bottom, and after it dries you should have a nice small, light, grippy block.
The benefit of the stacked corflute was that it added some height to be able to hang the part of the marker off to give her fingers more room to manoeuvre.
Supplies for reference, which I got from a local hardware store (the big green shed for those of you in Australia).
We noticed another benefit in that this can be used for other art tasks such as a grippy surface for cutting – our daugther places the item being cut on the block to help hold in place, with the part to cut hanging off the block – this is a good alternative to hanging the item off a table, or having to slide the scissors underneath the paper and the table it’s resting on.
