Pediatric Rehab Care for the Tri-State Area

Tips For Adding Fun To Your Child’s At-Home PT

Tips For Adding Fun To Your Child's At-Home PT

The key to effective physical therapy is consistency. Going to therapy for an hour every week is a good start, but it is important to incorporate what you learn at PT into your daily routine. For kids, doing PT exercises every day may seem tedious. Before these exercises become another chore for your kid to get out of the way, make the experience one they can look forward to. There are a few easy ways to turn your child’s at-home PT into something more interesting and rewarding. One of the best ways to do this is through gamification. 

What is Gamification

Gamification is the process of turning something into a game. By turning a job into what seems like a mundane task or game, it is easier to motivate others to become involved and stay consistent. We see gamification most often used in the classroom and at home with chores. By providing goals to work towards, physical therapy exercises can begin to feel more like winning a game. Here are a few examples of how you can gamify your physical therapy experience at home.

Use Stickers as a Resource

Everyone loves stickers. Not only can stickers be given to reward a job well done, but they are a good way of tracking progress. One of the most effective ways to gamify is by creating a sticker chart to keep track of your exercises and how well you are keeping up with them. To gamify your at-home routine, create a sticker chart with days of the week at the top and different stretches and exercises on the left. On each day of the week, you can let your child choose a sticker for all the exercises they complete and mark it on the chart. Providing an incentive for filling out the chart by the end of the week is a good way to keep kids motivated to finish their routine every day.

Utilize Dice

There are a few different ways you can gamify your routine with dice. You can gamify with dice by doing reps for each number you roll. Another way to use dice is by assigning an exercise to each number on the di. Create a list of the exercises on a whiteboard and cross them off as you go. You can roll once to determine the exercise and then again determine the number of reps.

Spin Charts

If you don’t have a spinner at home, there’s an app for that! The spinners work similarly to the dice. Start by creating a list of the exercises and assign each exercise a color or number. Then either you or your child can spin the spinner once to determine the exercise and one more time to determine how many reps.

The Best Pediatric Rehab Services Near Me

Excellence Rehab and Physical Therapy are dedicated to helping children develop the tools they need to be successful. If you have any questions about the benefits of pediatric physical therapy, or would like to know more about the services we provide, get in touch with us today.