Activities
Homemade Bubble Wands
I was going to take a selfie showing off my homemade bubble wands and it turns out that I’m incapable of blowing bubbles, keeping my eyes open, AND not looking mean or worried. Pipe cleaners/chenille […]
At School
At Home
Helping vs Revenge
This quote sums up everything I’ve ever tried to say about “behavior” and does it so perfectly succinctly in four sentences. What’s the best-case scenario? That instead of wanting to get revenge on children for […]
At School
Puddles & Choices
My son huffed at a puddle that he didn’t want to be there the other day and said, “The rain is making bad choices!” It made me laugh, because it was cute and funny. And […]
At School
How the Feelings Connect to the Actions
It can be really tricky to teach children how to understand the emotions inside of their bodies. It feels obvious after you already know all the emotion words — maybe, depending on how in tune […]
At School
What Roles the Team Has
One thing that’s really challenging for adults in all contexts—parenting, or professional contexts—is balancing between how much autonomy and how much protection to provide to their child. That’s why when I was writing this reminder […]
At School
What Sensory Self-Regulation Is
The transcription of the whiteboard can be found at my intro post for this series: What the Therapy Gym Is. When I set out to write this as a helpful reminder for the adults who […]
At School
What the Therapy Gym Is
Last year, I had the opportunity to train some of the staff at one of the schools I work at about how to use the therapy gym as a place for some of the children […]
Activities
Tracing Flight Trails
A fine motor, pre-writing activity offer in my therapy gym today: dot-to-dots to make the “flight paths” of different airplanes, rocketships, and helicopters. You can customize this whichever way matches the child’s level of drawing/tracing […]
Activities
Dino Drawings
One of my favorite tools for building a whole bunch of skills— hand strengthening, finger strengthening, hand-eye coordination, and then copying from a visual model, and occupationally meaningful writing— are these toys which I originally […]
Activities
BIG Word Search
With the big kids in my action room who still have handwriting or letter formation goals, one of the activities I set out is a big huge grid on the floor drawn on butcher paper, […]