I had a student recently who I wanted to give a fidget to. He already had a fidget for his classroom, but I had recently got a big bag of fidgets and found a particular one I thought he’d enjoy, that I would gift to him. I set up a little scavenger hunt for our … Read more
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 right now…to work on horizontal lines, vertical lines, diagonals, curves, loops, etc. All of these things are skills that children … Read more
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 found in a closet and have since googled to find out are called “Zoomorphs” and, more specifically, “Dinomorphs”. They’re basically … Read more
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, with my gigantic Sharpies, and offer to make a word search themed about whatever they’re interested in. The sheer size … Read more
I did this activity with one of my older elementary school aged kids (in the 8-10 range): we went on a “sensory scavenger hunt” together. I had a lot of ideas in mind while I did this. -I wanted the child to be able to take a break from any classroom time, and get outside … Read more
I have this great set of tents connected by a crawl-through tunnel, and the children who come to my therapy gym already love crawling through it. To add a bit of a game element to it, and also with a specific child in mind who loves numbers, I put a foam numbers puzzle in one … Read more
If you haven’t picked up on it by now, I really love it when activities can span across multiple weeks and have multiple steps and goals that shift and change each week. I feel like it helps kids recall their prior OT sessions as one overarching goal-oriented thing instead of only a handful of little disparate … Read more
In January, in my therapy gym, we decided to have a glow stick party. Technically there was no “reason” for this other than that it was fun and changed up the pace a little bit, but there is also clinically an argument to be made for lots of things that the kids experienced via the … Read more
One of the stations in my therapy gym right now is a dinosaur dig. I have had this idea in my mind for a long time and finally had time to construct it during the winter school break! The end result is a bin of sand with “dino bones” to hunt for, and their skeletons’ … Read more