What is crossing the midline? Pretend there is an imaginary line that divides the left and right side of the body from top head to bottom feet. Crossing the midline is when we reach across this imaginary line, with arms and legs crossing over to the other side. This should happen spontaneously in daily activities but some children need to be encouraged to develop this skill. Crossing the midline is an important developmental step that is often stressed by Occupational Therapists. Since the left and right sides of the brain each have different functions, their communication is crucial for physical, emotional, and cognitive success and future learning and quality driven movement.
Difficulty crossing the midline affects visual tracking leading to difficulty with learning such as reading and writing, independence self-care tasks such as putting on shoes and socks, and difficulty with sports and motor coordination. Signs that a child is not crossing the midline:. They may also switch their hands to hold the scissors with their non-dominant hand to cut. They may also have difficulty coordinating more complex gross motor movements such as kicking they may often switch legs to kick a ball or skipping.
They may also resist complex fine motor activities or fine motor activities in general because their hand skills using both sides together and also reaching across the body are diminished. There are many great ways to work on crossing midline.
I am listing some for you here and then I also include links at the end to other posts I have written with more ideas. Yoga poses are an excellent way to work on truck rotation which is an important skill for crossing midline. There are many great options for including Yoga in your home or classroom. I also really like the yoga cards and products from Kids Yoga Stories. This activity would be great to use in a group or with younger age children toddlers and preschoolers.
If you have a child who struggles with keeping both hands together on an imaginary boat oar, you could use a small wooden stick or large. You can encourage crossing midline with how you give directions for each of the movements or actions you have your child or student complete. Examples could be touching your right knee with your left hand, touching your right shoulder with your left hand, etc.
This is especially helpful for crossing midline if you can set it up on a vertical surface and have the writing space extra large. Using large butcher paper or sheets of paper and encouraging your child to start on the left side and draw to the right side of their body will encourage crossing the midline. Dancing, in general, is an excellent crossing midline activity, but adding streamers just makes it more fun for the children!
You can do this with music that gives specific motions or just have them dance as they want. If you want some music with motions, here are some ideas with videos from YouTube. My daughter took rock climbing lessons for two sessions and really enjoyed it. Not only does it promote great crossing midline line, but it also works on motor planning, visual-motor skills and provides excellent proprioceptive input for sensory processing.
Stringing beads can encourage midline when you encourage the child to push the beads across the string to the other end with the string laid out flat on the table. If they try to pick the string up and complete this vertically, try to encourage them to push the beads across horizontally. Scooping activities are a great way to have kids use their dominate hand and reach across to pour items. This encourages the child to reach across their mid-line to grab the items and scoop and pour.
For some kids, this develops automatically when they start to play with toys in infancy by banging toys together, climbing, reaching, etc. Some babies and children struggle with this task and never fully are able to cross their body with compensated somehow, like leaning or rotating with their trunk, switching hands to during an activity like writing or cutting with scissors. Or they continue to only use one arm on their same side of their body for the task.
You might be thinking, what does matter if they twist their trunk to grab a toy instead of reaching across their body? They got what they wanted right? While this may be true, the ability to cross midline has functional implications that could be limited.
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