Bilateral Coordination Skills

Bilateral coordination or crossing midline is an important skill in physical and mental development. By definition, bilateral coordination means ability to use both sides of the body simultaneously in a controlled fashion

Body’s midline is an imaginary line which divides body into two parts, left and right. Roughly, spine can be considered as the midline of our body. Good bilateral coordination indicates that brain is able to pass information from one side to another as needed  

This includes touching one elbow with another hand, drawing a horizontal line without switching hands or putting on a left leg sock using right hand. While these activities seem very obvious and does not need explicit thinking, kids who have not decided or don’t have dominant hand might face difficulty doing these activities 

Activities/Actions that need crossing the midline help in developing bilateral coordination

Signs of poor bilateral coordination:

1. Swapping hands in the middle of doing task which needs crossing midline
2. Poor fine motor skills, issues while working with pencil
3. Lack of focus and difficulties in following multistep instructions 
4. Difficulty in tracking visually moving objects 
5. Trouble in reading a complete line from a book  

Activities to improve bilateral coordination:
     
       There are many fun ways to do this. Few examples are painting walls with big size brush, watering plants with one hand, washing cars, scissoring, beading, lacing etc.

      So next time when you want to practise those skills,  you can also try putting on some nice music and do cross toe touching or cross knee to elbow touching with your child for 10 mins! Bonus - you might get flat abs 😜😜 Well not flat abs literally, but reduced fat layer on stomach can be expected 😂😂😂