A Study to Assess the Effectiveness of Structured Drawing in Improving the Fine Motor Skills of Children with Developmental Delay in a Selected Institute at Coimbatore

Back Ground: Development is the process whereby a young baby and child explores and learns and grows into adulthood. Individual skills are built up and combined to produce ever more sophisticated achievements (such as walking, talking, playing, thinking and communicating). Despite variability from child to child, there is a general order in the progressive development of individual skills. Simple skills precede the more difficult ones. Developmental delay is a descriptive term used when a young child's development is delayed in one or more areas compared to other children. Children show a delay in their understanding of the world and take longer to think and learn new skills, e.g. talking, self help skills such as dressing and eating independently. The age of acquiring a specific skill depends on the rate of learning. A child with an intellectual disability can still learn but needs more time and practice than other children. Like all children they need to feel good about themselves. Objectives: The objectives of the study were to assess the fine motor skills of children with developmental delay before administering structured drawing, to evaluate the effectiveness of structured drawing in improving the fine motor skills of children with developmental delay and to to find association of fine motor skills with selected demographic variables.

Methods: A Quasi experimental one group pretest post test design was used. Students aged between 4- 8 years with sample size 40 were taken through Convenient sampling technique in a special school. The Tool I: Structured questionnaire to collect demographic variable and the Tool II: to assess the fine motor skills of children( 4- 8 years).In Intervention module a Structured drawing( drawing activities) provided in individual basis according to the child's development, allowing maximum expression of creativity of the child.

Results: After training the children there was a improvement in the fine motor skills of children with developmental delay.

Conclusions: Structured drawing is an effective technique to improve the fine motor skills of children with developmental delay.