As I have always found that to make the children sit for sometime, especially with a dull activity which you mention as exercise or therapy, is very difficult. Our therapist also know that. So we device art techiniques which include many activities. So depending on the child’s interest we have to change the approach to make them do the activity.
One very good activity to improve muscle strength of fingers is to make dough from the wheat flour etc as for chapathi/roti.
An alternate and interesting variety will be to prepare paper maché. This involves more than one activity for fingers.
- Tearing of paper with tip of fingers
- Mixing glue and water (wrist movement)
- Mixing the paper/tissue pieces with glue-water and making dough
- To make the activity more interesting make shapes out of this dough and colour them.
To get an idea see the below link.
http://homecraftideas.blogspot.com/2008/08/paper-mach-art-secret-pen-holder.html
One more thing which I realised is, if I make Abhi do OT as exercise or OT activity, I also get disappointed or frustrated thinking,"God, how long I have to continue this to see the improvement in him". Like the doctor has said once, it wont happen in a day as miracle. So I also stopped to say about OT activities, instead tell only about what all way you can do ART.