Our Must Have Cerebral Palsy Toys
We’ve got a site that has an expanding number of great Cerebral Palsy toys which are all fantastic in their own way, but when you don’t want to spend alot (it can add up!) or find all the room to store them, it makes sense to trim down the selection and work out what are the “must have” toys to add to your collection.
Obviously the suitability will be different child to child depending on ability, goals, what you’ve already got etc, but the biggest bit of advice that I would give is quite simple:
Pick toys that you can use multiple ways across different abilities and goals with different levels of difficulty.
Our Experience
Our daughter’s main issue was/is high tone in her arm, so it affects her ability to open and close her fingers and her fine motor skills. So her ability was that she could only fit small things in there or open very minimally, but we knew the goal would be that she would hopefully gain function (opening more) and learn to open to enable her to grasp items, but also eventually be able to open to release items. So we went about picking toys that were small enough to be pushed into her tight hand/fist, but that she could eventually reach to grasp due to a smaller size.
For Example
If you take Spike The Fine Motor Hedgehog for example, we were able to us this for:
- Placing a stick in each hand and banging together
- Placing a stick in her hand so that it was pointing down (her tightness meant she could keep hold), and then getting her to try and line it up with a hole in the back (moving the hedgehog and helping release for success) to work on gross motor
- As she loosened up we’d take out half of the sticks, giving her more room, and then get her to try and reach and pull the sticks out. Then putting them back in as above
- We added more sticks as her ability improved that meant she had to be more precise with positioning
- We’d then hold the hedgehog in different positions to encourage /grabbing holding the sticks AND gross motor with moving and extending her elbow/shoulder
- As her release function improved we’d get her to remove and then drop them on the table, then put them back in
So many different progressions and difficulties with one toy! Once you get your head around looking at other ways a toys can be used outside of it’s standard purpose, it opens up a world of opportunity.
Okay, time to show you a handful of our Cerebral Palsy toys we like to use for different purposes, and some basic ideas to get you started!
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Learning Resources Spike the Fine Motor Hedgehog
Spike the Fine Motor Hedgehog was one of our favourite toys because it was so adaptable – the “spines” were a great size to start off with, that were able to grow as our daughters function improved. See above for some examples of the different ways we used it!
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Nene Toys Feed the Baby Chick
Apart from being really cute, the Nene Toys Feed the Baby Chick toy gave us a few different options on how to use it to target different areas. The magnet on the birds and worms were strong and that helped for success as they’d latch on when they got fairly close. As our daughter didn’t have much/any supination/pronation control, we found laying it on the table made the activity easier.
It is good for gross motor by either getting your child to hold the bird or securing in their hand (elastic bandage works well) and working on precision by getting them to choose or suggesting a colour worm to pull out.
For fine motor you can use the less affected hand with the bird and the more affected hand to try and pull the worms from the bird, or line up the birds in a row of play-doh, get them to grab the worm and drop it into the chick or the tree etc.
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Fisher-Price Stack & Explore Blocks
Getting right back to basics with the Fisher-Price Stack & Explore blocks, as they’re just very cheap and can be used for more than just stacking.
These essentially formed the beginning of our rehab as our daughter was fairly young (just over 1) and we were starting to work on gross motor skills and bring awareness to her affected arm. We started by doing the stacking for her, and encouraging movement of the affected arm to knock the tower over. We’d also put them on the ground in a row and get her to pull them over to reveal something under them.
As she got older we’d encourage her to build the tower with her non affected hand, then knock them down with her affected hand.
For fine motor we lined them up on a table lip facing up, and would get her to grab it with her affected hand, then pass to non-affected to stack. We would also use them as “buckets” to drop other small items and toys into.
For a bigger option, check out the Melissa & Doug Nesting Boxes.
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Fat Brain’s Squigz Starter Set
The Fat Brain’s Squigz Starter Set is a versatile toy set that over time we have used for:
– The obvious – pushing them together and pulling them apart
– Sticking them on walls/windows/surfaces and trying to get them off or just “boing” them
– Holding and pushing them onto the surfaces herself
– Sucking them onto thicker “match” game cards and getting her to grab the squigz to view the cardThese are a quality product so the suction is pretty decent. If your child doesn’t have alot of grip strength, try the Fat Brain’s Mini Squigz as they are smaller and suction grip is much less.
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Melissa & Doug Wooden Lacing Beads
The Melissa & Doug Wooden Lacing Beads are another versatile toy option, and threading definitely seems to be a favourite amongst OTs.
Great for either some fine motor practice by threading with the most affected hand, or even just holding and threading with the less/none affected hand.
The shapes are a good size and there’s some good variety, plus counting and colour recognition, and you can do other activities with them like block stacking and building etc.
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The above toys are just a small example of toys we’ve used for multiple purposes during our daughter’s Cerebral Palsy rehab. View all the toys here.
As mentioned above, the main thing to remember is to Pick toys that you can use multiple ways across different abilities and goals with different levels of difficulty. Have a clear picture of what your goals are and what you’re working on, what will come after that if you achieve it, and just browse toys either here, online or in the shops and you’ll open up a whole world of possibilities.