"Sra. Zhang... I sprained my good wrist..."

That was what one of my students walked into class telling me today. Now, this is not the first sprain, or even broken, limb that has plagued my classroom. To date, I've had 3 students on crutches, 3 in casts, and 4 in some sort of brace. That's actually not too bad considering I have 300 students. Most of the time, they're healed up pretty quickly too. However, today was the first time that a student has been unable to write because of the injury, which caused me slight panic at first, until I came up with a great alternative for her.


The activity was to create flashcards for different body parts. I provided a template with the Spanish word. The students needed to cut out each card, and draw the body part on the back. No English allowed! Here's my example from class.

Now, my dear friend wasn't able to use scissors and could barely hold a pencil. So I grabbed the big picture cards and word labels and had her match them up on the carpet in the middle of the room. This way, she was still matching pictures to words, but didn't have to do the work herself.

Since it's faster to just match pictures/words than actually draw out the body parts, she finished quickly. So the next task I gave her was to create a body out of words. She had to order to word labels from head to toe and lay them out on the carpet. She did a great job!

These are great alternatives for any student who has trouble with fine motor skills. While it is important to practice fine motor skills in all classes, sometimes that focus can take away from learning content. So why should someone sit there and be frustrated with HOW to do activity when s/he could be getting the same practice with the content but not be frustrated with HOW to do the activity? My student couldn't write, but was still able to practice the same content, in practically the same way, as all of her classmates. It just took a little extra thinking on my part. She even got extra practice since she was able to finish more quickly!