When I am working in a school, I have so many skills that I would like to work on, but I also need to make sure that practice of writing fits into our therapy session. I have heard many people talk about doing warm up activities before their writing activities, but I have a tendency…

To work on pencil control, it really is great to do activities where you are having to control your pencil.  For this I use pencil paths, pencil adventures, circles, and coloring. I really enjoyed using the flower honeycomb activity that I made for doing circles, and I wanted to have some more activities that would…

I love having kids drive on roads on the ground to help them develop their sense of space and direction and to help with following lines, which is all a precursor for writing. I use road writing lines to help kids who love cars learn their letters, and have posted about car mats. These cute…

So you have a child that needs to work on writing, but is not really that motivated. He can come up with his own sentences, but avoids writing. How do you make it interesting so that he will participate? For kids that are capable of writing multiple sentences, one fun activity that I do is…

This is a little peek at a new clothespin game that I have been working on. I love the new design.

I got a chance to try out the app Ready to Print over the weekend.  This app just recently came out, and I have wanted to try it out, but sadly, I do not own an iPad.  I hope to remedy that fact as soon as I have some money saved up for it, but…

Some people have started back to school, and others will be starting soon. We are starting back this week, so I thought that it would be the perfect time to share some information about the Tran-Quill writing kit, and to give one away to one lucky reader. The Tran-Quill kit has a vibrating base, with…

I have a new activity for my bouncy balls to participate in. I stuck five golf tees into a piece of rigid Styrofoam, and then had kids balance the bouncy balls onto the tees. You can increase the challenge by holding multiple balls in one hand, and putting the balls on the tee at the…

It is the beginning of the school year, and to have a fun and interesting thing for the kids to demonstrate some writing skills, I made an About Me page. It is a basic little page for the kids to write some of their favorite things, such as favorite food, game, animal, etc. I can…

You can put manipulatives into any container, but when you make the container into a creature that is hungry, it makes it so much more fun to do the work. I saw this cute little creature on Pinterest, but it originally came from a blog called The Preschool Experiment.  He was so easy to make,…

Getting both hands to work together can be fun, and if you add a vertical surface, then you are able to really get some good bimanual practice. A great way to work both hands is to trace around a stencil on a vertical chalk board or white board. You have to hold the stencil/picture up…

I was searching for small rolling toys to use in a game and I came across these Cars Micro Drifters. They didn’t work for the game I was looking to use them for, but they were the perfect size and have a roller ball under them, so they move exactly the way I wanted them…

I started this craft thinking it would be so cute to cut out bugs and glue them onto a bug box like you caught the bugs.  This morphed into a jar, because a jar is see through, and a bug box is not.  It then morphed into a full game with clothespins and everything, but…

Spring is here and bugs are fun. I found these bug boxes at the dollar spot at Target, and they had packages of bugs too. I put the bugs into a pop up tunnel, and had the students crawl in, get a bug with tongs or pinch clips, and bring it out to put it…

Let me start by saying that I’m probably one of the few pediatric occupational therapists who needs help with arts and crafts!  No, seriously!  I am so thankful for the many wonderful websites and blogs whose authors share some of the most incredible activity ideas with me!  And, Pinterest?  Well, I’m not really sure what…

Young pre-school kids love playing with cars, and they are developing a whole slew of skills while they are playing. It is the perfect activity that is simple, can be self-directed or adult influenced, and every part of the activity works on a skill that is needed in life. When you play on a car…

Last week we made catapults out of clothespins, so this week we used those catapults to play a game and work on writing. I made a target to shoot pom poms at, and use the pom poms as birds that we shoot with the catapult (kind of like angry birds). Inside the target, there are…

I found this book called Cloudination at the AOTA conference, and it was such a simple and unique idea that would work well in some therapy situations. The book has pictures of clouds, and you draw what you see in the clouds with a dry erase marker. The book is simple, but has potential for…

Here is a post submitted by a reader: This is a good activity for drawing circles, handwriting, and cutting, as well as pattern recognition.  I created a “caterpillar head” print out and have the kids each color and cut out the head. Then, they choose three colors of construction paper to use to make the…

Mature and refined grasp patterns, as well as in hand manipulation, require use of the small finger muscles, and they use the two sides of the hands separately. It can be challenging learning how to coordinate the pinky finger side of the hand separately from the index finger side of the hand.  Similar movements are…

Have you ever wanted to add resistance for strengthening the writing muscles of the hands? Writing in clay is a perfect way to do this. This week we made letters out of clay/playdoh, and had the kids write letters on a clay tracing board. I used a little chalkboard that I got from oriental trading…

It is time for spring and flowers, so how about a new clothespin game where you have to build the flower petal by petal and use the clothespin to hold the petals onto the flower. There are several different ways to play the game.  The most simple way is to shoot the flat marble down…

I have been working on some clothespin games for at least six months now. I wanted to have a board to attach clothespins to, but to have the option to play several different games. I went through a lot of trials and errors before I came up with my current solution. I was trying to…

When I was working on making weighted pencils, I bought some Coban (or generic Coban) to try out on the metal coupling nuts.  I didn’t try it because the craft foam worked so well.  I was reminded that I had the Coban, and so I tried it out on the weighted pencil and it works…

The color pop game is a great game that incorporates quite a few skills within one game. Some of the skills used in the game are fine motor, visual scanning, writing, counting, and finding coordinates on a chart. I use either colored porcupine balls or different colored pom poms as the popcorn in the game….

Last year I made some really cute heart butterflies, and wanted to increase it by having other bugs to make too.  They make cute little valentine love bugs. The bugs are very similar to the heart butterflies with the same template shapes, but changed in order to look more like ladybug type of bugs.  You…

For this activity, we are incorporating very simple coloring and cutting of easy shapes. Then you can put those shapes together to make a pretty picture to take home. Two simple designs to choose from are a flower or a butterfly. With the flower, you have a circle for the center and ovals for the…

Any square piece of paper can be made into a Cootie Catcher. Fold two corners together and crease firmly. unfold.  Then fold the other two corners together and crease again. Fold each corner point into the center. flip it over and fold all four of these corners into the center. Under the inside flaps, you…

Today we did cootie catchers.  I spent some time making a template.  I will upload that with pictures and directions tomorrow.

Cootie catchers are great fun for kids to play, and they lend themselves very well to the learning environment. I use them in order to have kids work on writing within small designated spaces, and they can be used to work on counting and review. I have re-vamped my cootie catcher templates to include some…

I have some students that have trouble copying from the board during class.  When practicing this, I noticed that they are copying letter by letter rather than writing a whole word.  This means that they write a letter, look up at the board, write a letter, look at the board, write another letter, etc.  I…

When you have kids that need a higher level of challenge for visual scanning, visual perception, and writing, it can be hard to find activities that are difficult enough for them to do and that give enough of a challenge. I want to work on visual scanning on the board to search and find the…

I put out a challenge a couple of weeks ago to have people send me ideas of ways to use Crazy Cubes in therapy.  They just seemed to lend themselves perfectly to therapeutic activities, but I wanted more than just what I would come up with.  I was going to compile all of the ideas…

A lot of the time, I will go to see a patient/student/client, and will create an activity right there on the spot.  I don’t always plan ahead too much.  When I want to do that activity again, I make it up again.  This is mostly with pen and paper activities.  Putting them in this blog…

Lately I have been wanting to do my sentence memory copying activity with the kids that I am working with, and decided to modify it a bit to add monsters / creatures. I have used the monster drawing type of activity that I did in the Roll a Creature game, and added sentences to remember…

There’s no question that cursive handwriting has taken the leading role on the stage of forsaken fine motor skills.  Its glamour has paled and its loops have sagged, that’s for sure.   Cursive debates have been making their rounds throughout the country.  But notwithstanding their clamor, the curly cues have retained their share of the billing. …

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” (Frederick Douglass)     One of my favorite quotes is from an article in the Journal of Education Psychology, titled “The Role of Mechanics in Composing of Elementary School Students:  A New Methodological Approach.” (1)  It goes like this: “Reading is at the heart of…

Most of the apps that I have been using lately have been for me improve my productivity and paperwork, or as a reward for a student at the end of the therapy work. That being said, I recently tried out the Dexteria App to see what it does and how I might use it. There…

A guest post from regular contributor Katherine Collmer. Now therein lies the question!  What exactly DO we do with handwriting?  When I was a new pediatric occupational therapist, I found that question to be both disturbing and intriguing.  It disturbed me on two levels.  First, that I didn’t really know if we did?  Second, why…

I ran across this little car on Amazon called the Doodle-Track Car .  You draw a black line, and it has a sensor that will follow the line.  I thought that this car would fit into my road theme, and kids would have fun drawing lines for the car to follow.  I modified my road…

The blog at Pediastaff was looking for some therapy games that have a connection to Hanukkah, and I have been making a bunch of games lately. My son was thrilled to help me create a board game using a dreidel to determine the spaces you move. I made a game board that would fit with…

Easter is almost here so here is an Easter activity.  It includes practice writing lines, coloring, cutting, and writing.  You can choose a simple grouping of eggs to practice lines on and then color.  It also has a place at the bottom of the picture to write some sentences.  The second choice is  eggs to…

This week as I was driving to work, I came up with a way to make the clothespin frame for the games using much more accessible supplies. I had thought of this one before, but thought that it might not work, and might be too difficult, but I was wrong. It works well, and it…

I have several kids who are working on being able to write their personal information, and are struggling to find the letters on the keyboard. I wanted them to work on finding the letters of their name, but wanted to start off of the keyboard, so I made a paper and velcro keyboard for them….

I wanted to use the Munchy Ball in a new game with letters so that we could practice writing and build fine motor skills and hand strength at the same time. I started with just cutting foam squares from different colors and writing letters on them.  I also made a color dice by sticking colored…

Animals are great fun for kids and can make it motivating to work on skills. I don’t have any real animals to work with, so I made some pet store animals for the kids to feed, use clothespins, and practice some writing. The activity is simple and cute. First you roll the dice to determine…

What exactly are the fine motor movements that are used in writing? In a mature dynamic grasp, the fingers do the majority of the work, but the whole hand is required in order to stabilize and provide strength for the activity. The most important muscles for efficiency when making the actual pencil movements, are the…

Here is a great activity that is worth doing every year. I love having kids tear paper because it really makes them work hard with their fingers and work on those fine motor skills. I have had kids cut out pumpkins and create a jack-o-lantern face on them. Today we are going to tear colored…

There is a new item in the store from Your Therapy Source.  It is called Finish the Holiday Pictures – December Edition, and it is an activity to work on visual perceptual skills and copying pictures, with a December theme.  It includes 20 pictures of patterns to copy with a December holiday theme.  There are…

Fourth of July is this week, and what better way to practice writing different types of lines than drawing fireworks.  You can make fireworks out of different colors, and make squiggly lines, straight lines, curly lines, circles, and spirals. You can use colored pencils to color the fireworks.  I recommend that you use broken crayons…

To work on a combination of skills, I made some fish with letters on them, added some pipe cleaner to make it metallic, and made some fishing poles out of pipe cleaner and magnets.  Fishing is a great way to work on bimanual hand skills, fine motor skills, visual perceptual, and motor planning.  I used…

I was working with some kids the other day, and we were coloring flowers, working on holding the pencil in a good grasp, and getting some good strokes of the colored pencils, and one little guy was not able to move his fingers independently while he was coloring. I had him do some small circles…

Spring is here and it is time to brighten things up with flower activities. I created a craft to draw on the flower petals, cut them out, and then glue them onto a paper.  The petals have light lines to trace with zig-zags, loops, lines, and circles. I also included a page that you just…

I have been using dice a lot in therapy, and playing games with letters to have kids work on their writing, so I wanted to combine the two, and had some other games that use dice, but I wanted to make my own dice with my own stuff on them (more on that later). I…

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, so it is a great time to use turkey crafts in your therapy sessions. Most of these turkey  crafts/activities work on fine motor skills, and some incorporate writing into the activity in the form of writing about what you are thankful for. Mama OT has a really cute bottle…

I am always working on interesting and fun ways to work on fine motor skills, and love using clothespins to work on the skills. The kids enjoy pretend playing with ice cream, but for some kids, the ice cream buttons are too hard for them to do. I want them to work on fine motor…

I started working on a craft for cutting out bugs, and it morphed into a complete game that includes catching bugs and using clothespins to hold the bugs in the bug jar. I am thrilled with the little bug jar, and they can stand upright using a stand made out of popsicle sticks ( Wood…

I love decorating gingerbread houses, and it works on some great skills with spreading the frosting and placing the candy.  I will often do a simplified version making graham cracker houses instead of gingerbread, and love to use it as a great take home Christmas activity.  Working in the schools, it is harder to carry…

This is a guest post by Donna Abramson, OTR Opening and closing clothespins is a wonderful way for children to develop strength in the muscles of their hand, particularly the webspace – which helps them to hold the pencil with a correct tripod grip. Using clothespins also helps children to separate the radial and ulnar…

We have another quick guest post by Barbara Bailey. I found these adorable little guys on clearance at four for $1.00 at the dollar store.  I have actually bought them for the past several years and have found them at Walmart as well.  I realize it is a bit late to still find them but…

This is a guest post by Katherine Collmer from Handwriting With Katherine. Did you know that efficient handwriting skills are first cousins to efficient postural skills?  And were you aware that good postural skills are close relatives of effective visual skills?  It’s true.  The “hip bone IS connected to the thighbone” and, indirectly, to every…

Beverly Moskowitz has developed a handwriting program called Size Matters Handwriting Program and she has put together some quick tips that use her program’s concepts.  You can find her program at Real OT Solutions.  I have taken one of Beverly’s classes and it was full of good information and full of energy.  I have incorporated…

I have several kids that I work with who needed to get back to the basics of writing. Some of them could not even follow a path from one point to another. I got out my car mat, and had them follow the roads with their car and look for the places that I told…

Kids make a lot of changes with their handwriting legibility when they are aware of the expectation and know that they will need to fix what the teacher can’t read or that doesn’t meet the teacher’s expectation. For those kids, it makes sense for them to check their own work before turning it in, but…

A cool website lets you enter your text and it will make a worksheet that you can print out to practice handwriting.  It is pretty cool.  handwritingworksheets.com.

You know those days where you can’t find the activity that you want to do, and all you can find in your bag is some paper. I have no problem making any activity that I find therapeutic, so I pull out the paper and want to work on writing. Well Hang man fills a lot…

I usually do activities that incorporate multiple skills into the task, and love it when we are writing and the kids have to write positive things. So I made the happy caterpillar. The kids have to write something they like about themselves (or that makes them happy) on each of the caterpillar body parts. You…

While working with my students this year, I have been trying to work on not only the fine motor aspects of writing, but also the memory aspect of writing. When you can’t remember the words that you are writing, then how can you write the sentence that is made up of those words. I have…

I am writing a lot about the roads that I made because I have been working on them for so long, and have been keeping myself from writing about them until they were done. I use the big roads and letters, and the maps the most. That could be because they are the ones that…

I love using the color pop game in therapy. Ever since I created it, it has become my go to for many therapy sessions because it is so basic, and can be so easily modified to work on so many different areas that I want to address.  Since I use it so much, I have…

When I was making my Clothespin Tower Games, one of the games is a game about building an ice cream sundae.  The game easily translates into a flat game without the tower, so I thought that at times I would prefer to use it that way.  It is exactly like the tower game, but played…

Summer painting wouldn’t be complete without a little ice painting. I started with a little ice cube tray that I put water in and a drop of food coloring in each space. I also put a toothpick in each spot so that when it hardened in the freezer, each ice cube would have a little…

In order to work on in-hand manipulation skills with some kids, I decided to use little pieces of broken off crayon.  I had them hold two crayons at the same time, one in their palm, and one in their fingers.  Then I had them draw a shape (I had circles and rainbows) with one color,…

I primarily use my iPad as a productivity tool, and type reports on it.  It is very rare that I use it during direct treatment, although I do use it as a reward at the end of a session.  One app that I absolutely love for direct treatment is called Rollercoaster Builder Travel. This app…

It is no secret that I have an affinity for using chopsticks to work on developing high level fine motor control, and I figured out a way to use them with the iPad. I was playing a game on the iPad that requires pinching your fingers together, and my finger nails were too long, so…

Halloween is right around the corner, so here is a pumpkin template to cut out and glue on a piece of paper.  Cut out the eyes, nose, and mouth, and glue them on.  There is a white pumpkin in case you want your students to color it too. I then had my students write what…

At Christmas, I got my kids a generic Jenga game for really cheap, and I got myself an extra one because I knew that I would want to make a therapy game out of it. I didn’t give it much thought until I was brainstorming new game ideas and using dominos as part of a…

Karen over at (B)e(LO)n(G) OT has been drawing Lava paper and using it to practice writing, so I made some for her in photoshop, and have been using it as well.  Karen has a couple of posts about using her paper, and I use it in the same way. When writing, all the letters have…

The sliding glass door that is. With washable markers please. I will not be held responsible for the permanent marker on your walls. Writing on a vertical surface is great practice because it puts the wrist into extension and strengthens the arm muscles. It is hard to work on using just your fingers though when using…

Another OT Blog that I enjoy reading is OT Tools for Public Schools.  She recently posted about using scrabble tiles for a student to write his name and do his spelling words.  She added velcro to the back of the tiles so that the student could stick them to felt.

It is great to work on fine motor control away from the body, as that gives more of a challenge to the muscle control. You have to have control and coordination to balance and stack small objects onto a surface. i have the game scatterpillar scramble, and wanted to make a similar motor activity that…

I have many kids that I see for problems with their writing, and many times it is not the legibility of their letters that is the problem, it is the spacing of the words.  I thought that if they could make their own spacers to use when writing, they might be more apt to use…

Let’s talk about weighted pencils.  Abby has a nice post about making weighted pencils.  I have used weighted pencil kits to add weight onto a regular pencil, and I have seen the do it yourself pencil weights using hex nuts, but there are some things that have always bothered me about them. The metal on…

I did this activity on Monday.  I used the christmas tree cutting template that I made.  We cut out the shapes and glued them in place on one side of a piece of paper.  On the other side of the paper, I made lines to write on. This is the base paper that I like…

For a fun craft this year, I had the kids color hearts, cut them out, and make butterflies out of them.  I think that they made adorable little love bugs.  Maybe next I will create different bugs to be cut out, but for now it is butterflies. I had the kids glue their butterflies onto…

I have a couple little guys that always try to make the tail of the lower case g come down from the middle of the g. We practice it, we talk about it, and they are doing it right, then next time I see them, they are back to doing it the old way. Last…

When playing with the Munchy Ball with a young boy, we worked on making some houses. I tried to have him make a woven stick Teepee such as the one made by Timbernook, but our ground was too hard and we could not pierce it with sticks well enough for them to stay in place…

I wanted to play a game with a student that would use spring clips in order to work on finger strengthening. I got little pom poms at michael’s (a craft store), and we played the game of Mancala . Her hands were quite tired by the end of the game. We will play some other…

Painting is often good therapy, but you can kick it up a notch by using marshmallows as the painting tool. You can grade the type of grip used by using the large marshmallows or the mini marshmallows. You can use regular paint on paper and just dip the marshmallow in and make designs on the…

I saw these little Monster Marbles at Walmart, and had to know what they were. They are little monster characters with a marble on the bottom so that the figures roll across the table. They just come with the little monsters only, and I decided they were perfect to use in a game, so I…

When I first gave a student q-tips to paint with, she did a lot of smearing and squishing of the paint on the paper.  She was working those fine muscles of the hand, but there was a little something missing from the picture.  It was a very nice masterpiece, but lacked the lovely dots that…

When I was using the road maps with some students, they had a very hard time following the paths, so I decided to simplify it even more. A couple of these kids had trouble drawing a line from one point to another. I figured a good transition would be having a car follow a road…

A fun activity that we did at a Zaner Bloser workshop that I went to while at the OTAC spring fling, were these pages with paths on them. You place a metal piece on the path (I used a metal nut) with a magnet underneath. Then you move the magnet to make your piece follow…

This week I wanted to incorporate some targeted fine motor and hand strengthening in our sessions, and then follow up with some writing tasks. I used the foam letter squares that I made for the pool writing activity. I spread all of the foam letters on the floor and gave each student a color to…

With short treatment times in school therapy, and lots to accomplish during that time, I will make good use of my time by combining a strengthening activity with a writing activity. You could think up many variations and pairings of hand strengthening and writing. My favorite includes letter beads, theraputty or squishy cheese, and a…

When I am looking at the basic clothespin game that has been used through the ages, most of them are simple matching games on the side of a can. I wanted to take the concept of my flat clothespin games, and merge it with the concept of the can type of clothespin game, and the…

There is a new app that was developed by the makers of Dexteria that is specifically for the preschool set.  The activities are simple, and it has some fun, motivating parts to it.  The app is called Dexteria Jr, and is made by Binary Labs.  The folks at Dexteria got feedback that some parts of…

I love the pencil adventures and pencil obstacle courses, and love to use them as a warm up or as a pencil control activity for kids who are very reluctant to write. I will frequently just draw out a path for kids to follow spur of the moment, but these pencil adventures are nice to…

I finished making four new pencil adventures, and my son was eager to try them out. While he was doing them, he commented that it was hard to stay on the path, and that his hand was getting tired from working at being so careful. In the dragon adventure, you have to avoid the dragon’s…

I finally completed another set of pencil adventures.  These have been partially done for ages, and I made a big push to finish them completely.  There are 7 of them, and include: The Cafeteria, Hawaiian Vacation, Ski Vacation, Halloween Haunted House, and 3 pages of race tracks that include race track letters to follow. Since…

The Pencil Obstacle Courses are such fun, and are what spurred me on to create the Pencil adventures.  Now there are new obstacle courses that include some hole punching and cutting with scissors.  These are created by Jennifer Dodge, who has an OT website named School-OT.com.  Here is all about these new obstacle courses in…

I have changed the writing charms just a little, and added some frog charms to the options.  The change is that the band holding the charm onto the pencil is skinnier and less obtrusive.  I really liked the squishy stretchy attachment, but it was too distracting for some of the kids that I have been…

Karen over at Miss Awesomeness uses Lava Paper that she thought up and that I made for her. I have tried the Lava Paper with some of my kids as well, but many of my students had trouble with the “complex” concept of Lava. I know lava is not truly that complex, but many of…

Today we have a quick and simple writing activity that requires little to no preparation or planning. All you need is paper and pencil (or other writing tool). It may seem like just a writing activity, but you have other skills incorporated just by where you put the paper. First I wrote 6 words onto…

I have been working on a fairly complex (for me to create) clothespin game, and am getting burned out on it, so I took a (long) break from working on it and made a quicker and easier clothespin game. This one consists of game boards similar to the Monster Bowling boards, and Ocean animals that…

It is always a good time to show your love of Occupational Therapy. I created a lovely flower around the shape of OT. You can print out the flower and color it yourself or have your patients color it. Coloring works on many skills such as fine motor, and visual motor. If you put the…

I like to work on many skills within the same activity, and these folded flowers definitely do that.  I discovered these via pinterest, and they are originally on Whimsical World of Laura Bird. I often have kids that need to work on writing small enough to fit into a specified space, such as writing answers…

It is always fun for kids to be able to take home a fun item that they created, and the paper helicopters are a nice finished project. They are pretty quick to make, but you can have the kids do more things to them before they are finished. I am going to have my students…

A simple activity that I did a few weeks ago is making a paper rainbow mosaic. I drew the rainbow template and cut it out. I then had my student trace around the curved rainbow lines and cut them out of colored construction paper. We then glued the rainbow onto a sheet of white paper,…

I see so many articles and statements about the dynamic tripod grasp being the one that should be used, and that you need to have a child learn to use that grip. I think that’s rubbish. Yes, the dynamic tripod is the most efficient, but many grasps can be just as efficient if they are…

It is always frustrating when I see kids that have such weak hands and fingers that they hyper-extend, and none of the usual tools and methods help. I want to help them to be able to participate. If they weren’t having to work so hard at keeping a hold on their pencil, they might be…

Most kids do not need to use a pencil grip. I rarely recommend having a student use a special grip, and when I do recommend it, it means that the grip really does help. What are the determining factors for needing a pencil grip? The student is not able to maintain the proper grip on…

Very frequently, I draw a path for kids to follow with their pencil.  I often draw animals beside the path to make it fun and tell them they have to stay on the path so that the lion won’t get them.  I have wanted to have some fun ready made ones, but they are hard…

To work on pencil control, I created some Pencil Adventures.  When I started making the pencil adventures, I was inspired by the pencil obstacle courses that were created by another Occupational Therapist, Jennifer Dodge.  I now have her obstacle courses available here on Therapy Fun Zone, and I am so excited about it.  These ones…

I wanted to do some direction following and learning right and left, as well as memory, so I created a pizza delivery game. This game uses a floor road map that I made, and writing out and following the directions to get to different houses on the map. I made this huge road map on…

Last month, I put out a call to have other therapists share creative ideas using crazy cubes. I did this because I saw a lot of potential for these little toys to work on fine motor skills and hand strengthening, but I thought that there should be more to them that the basic pushing and…

I have been doing a lot with Munchy Ball and realized that he could easily be incorporated into games the same way that I use clothespins in games. Munchy Ball is a ball with eyes, and a mouth cut into it that opens his mouth when you squeeze the ball. It has great resistance to…

The pool is a fun and important place to spend time in during the summer months. You can add some fun word activities and even incorporate some writing to the fun of summer. I cut up some packs of sponges (but you could use craft foam just as easily) into quarters and wrote letters on…

Resistance keeps your muscles strong, and the little muscles in the fingers need to work and get strong along with the rest of the muscles of your body. I love having kids get letters randomly in order to practice writing the letters and words, since the randomness is somehow more fun than me giving them…

Squeezing sponges is a great activity for hand strengthening, so I came up with a game to play that incorporates the squeezing of the sponges. This game will need to be played outside because it can get very wet. I wanted the kids to be able to squeeze the sponges on something that was upright,…

When I think of therapy activities, I keep in mind what skill I am looking to improve. When trying to challenge someone’s fine motor skills, I try to come up with tiny things to hold. I figured that Q-tips were pretty tiny, so how about we do some painting with them. I made them even…

I have posted about Q-tip painting before, but another therapist has a different twist on it.  She has made some templates to do the q-tip painting, which requires more precision in the painting. This is a guest post by a therapist,  Tova Stulberger, who made some templates to use when Q-tip painting. Instructions: Kids dip…

Good in-hand manipulation skills can be an indicator of how good handwriting will be.

Sometimes personality is a big component of good writing. If they don’t care if their writing is good, it won’t be, and OT won’t change that. You can’t change personality with OT.

I made a fun little game for spring with rainbows and words.  I call it the rainbow puzzle game, and you can download it for free (you can also find it in the shops).  You have to roll 3 dice first, a number dice, a color dice, and a word dice.   You remember what you…

I was given a trial of the Rainbow Sentences App, and want to share how I used it and how it worked for me. I used it with a student who really struggles in all areas of reading and writing sentences. In the app, you are given lines that make up a sentence, a picture…

To continue with my dice obsession, I made a roll a creature game that has two dice that have creature body parts on them, and one with numbers on it, as well as some cards with four of the body parts. The object of the game is to roll the dice, and then you have…

I am always on a quest for fun and interesting ways to work on writing and school skills. I have been on a bit of a dice kick, so I created a writing game using dice with words on them. The game has 4 noun dice, 4 verb dice, and 4 descriptive word dice. For…

When I see kids for therapy, I like to make it a fun and motivating time to work on underlying skills and practice class skills (such as writing) in an interesting way. If we make it fun and interesting, then the kids are more likely to participate to the best of their abilities. Many therapists…

I have created more scissor cutting designs.  Have the client color it in, cut out the shapes and glue it all together.  Here is a car design. Here is the link to the PDF finished sample. here is the PDF for the cut out template.

Making Turkeys for Thanksgiving is a great time to incorporate a lot of skills into your therapy session. I love that the feathers are perfect for writing on and being able to create a thankful craft. Cutting with scissors is a skill that works on bimanual skills, motor planning, fine motor, etc. I have created…

Here is a Christmas tree template for coloring, cutting and putting together.  First the finished product. Next, the template.  I have the template both plain white, and in colors. Here are the pdfs. Save Save

Here is a snow man template to color and cut.  The client has to draw the face and add any extra accessories. Here is a picture of the template. Here is a PDF file for the snow man template.

Everyone has those days where you just need to pull an activity out of your bag that is simple and requires no extra preparation. I have quite a few of those types of activities lurking at the bottom of my bag, and a favorite is the alphabet search. It combines visual scanning, fine motor skill,…

I have a group of three students who have trouble copying sentences from the board in class. When we did some practice during therapy, it turned out that the kids could not remember the words that they were trying to copy, so they were copying the words one letter at a time, and did not…

I have been doing this sentence memory activity periodically with a small group of kids. I decided to do it again and add the challenge of chopsticks along with the sentences. To summarize, I have the sentences typed on a piece of paper, and the words on pieces of foam with magnets on the back….

I have some kids that are just at the beginning stages of following lines with a pencil, and have been attempting to follow the pencil paths in the bee honeycomb activity, but the paths are a little too small for an early beginner. I modified the paths to create some wider and simpler paths to…

I live in sunny Southern California, so we have to pretend that we have snow. We can still enjoy some hot cocoa even though the temperatures are in the 70s. (I even wear a sweatshirt in the mornings). The rest of the country has lots of snow, so making snow men is an important and…

I saw a cute little snow man mentioned on a teacher’s site, and I thought it would be perfect to use in therapy.  The original source of the picture was from here, but I have made my own to cut out, color, and dress your snowman. There is a plain white picture to color and…

As part of writing legibility, second to recognizable letters, spacing between words is very important. If there is not a noticeable space between words that is double to triple the space between letters, then all of the words run together to make it unreadable. In the early years, kids are often taught to finger space…

There is a set of standards that have been worked out for what is expected with writing and typing per age group.  These are called the Written Production Standards for Handwriting and Keyboarding grades k-8.  They are research based, and were Sponsored by Zaner-Bloser in partnership with the American Association of School Administrators. These are…

School is just starting in my neck of the woods, so with the beginning of the school year, it’s time to start my therapy kids off by making sure that they are on target with their letter sizes. I love using mud paper, and have several different types of stuck in the mud paper, so…

I have been meaning to make a clothespin game with bugs and their legs (the clothespins) for a while, and have just finished it. It combines two of the kids’ favorite things, sugar and bugs. This game is great for any time of the year since there is no time of the year that sugar…

I have been seeing kids this summer for an early intervention program, and have been playing with sidewalk chalk and water.  Some younger kids will have trouble with squirt guns, so we are going to try a regular spray bottle. I broke all of the brand spankin’ new sidewalk chalk into smaller pieces.  There was…

I played with foam letters with the kids in school where we rolled the dice and then fed the letters to the Munchy Ball, and now that it is summer, we took the game to the pool so that we could swim for the letters. The fun foam letters float, so it makes it easy…

I have written about coloring detailed geometric shape pages to work on hand and finger strengthening and visual perception in older students. You can buy a book of these coloring pages on Amazon, but you can also now make your own using the Kaleidopaint App. It is a free app for the iPad. The app…

You can try every pencil grip available at Amazon, and you may have no success with changing the way a child holds their pencil. Really, the simpler the solution the better, and if it is simple, it makes it more likely that the child, teacher, and parent will be able to do it every day…

It is the time of year to cut out and make turkeys.  I did a few turkeys last week, and will be doing more this week. Check out last year’s post on these Turkeys to get the templates. Save Save

I have worked out an even easier way (in my opinion) to make the game boards.  I have it down to a science, and it doesn’t take me very long with this new technique.  I hot glue strips of the coroplast material onto a scrapbook sheet protector.  It is much easier, and it is quite…

When working with students in school, my job as an Occupational Therapist is to help kids to participate in class. We work on writing, improving fine motor skills, hand coordination, visual motor skills, and all of the other skills that are needed in a classroom. Sometimes it helps to have the lines on the paper…

I found these little magnets that are perfect for working on fine motor skills while playing games. I used the games from my clothespin games, and put them on a cookie sheet instead of the clothespin frame.  Then the magnets can be used as the game pieces. Here are posts about the games, and here…

Last week I posted about regular (and mini) battleship games to work on fine motor skills and visual scanning, but have you ever played paper battleship to work on fine motor and writing skills?  Paper battleship is played the same way as regular battleship, but you have paper grids, and you have to use a…

Holding small objects is a benefit of good fine motor skills, and to work on developing and perfecting those fine motor skills, you can use small objects as a tool. Push pins or thumb tacks that you would use in a cork board are usually a perfect size to facilitate a good tripod grasp. The…

Playing with sidewalk chalk can work on and use a lot of different skills during therapy, and is a good activity. Using short pieces of chalk forces the fingers to use a tripod grasp, by using the index, second finger, and thumb. Writing on the sidewalk is also good for range of motion because the…

I love using the button food for practicing buttoning and working on fine motor and visual perceptual skills. I made some order forms so that the kids can practice writing and sequencing their sandwich toppings as well. The kids can take your order and put the fixings on the sandwich. I also made some sandwich…

I was given the sentence builder app (by Mobile Education Store) to try out, and at first I tried to use it the way it was meant to be used. The way the app works is that a sentence is on the screen along with a picture that the sentence is describing. You have to…

When you have a student who knows what they want to write but all the years of therapy are not making their writing more legible, you have to try other options. Often when kids have really bad writing with no spacing, they also have trouble reading as the two are very connected. I have one…

I love tiny toys to use when working on fine motor skills, and the cuter the better. Even better is when they come with little places to put the toys. For example, this little train play set , which are smaller than Squinkies, came with a little train to put the little animals into. It…

When writing, the most efficient way to hold a pencil is using three fingers (index, middle, and thumb) on the pencil, and move just the fingers to make the letters (this is called a dynamic tripod grasp).  There are many other ways to grasp the pencil, and some of them are efficient and functional as…

Cursive handwriting is like a sleeping dog…don’t wake it up unless you want to hear some barking!  As innocent as it may look, it conceals a great deal of energy and power.  It certainly must because it can cause a lot of discussion among handwriting advocates.  Discussion is a good avenue for sharing and learning…

Have you noticed that a lot of students with autism hold their pencil with 4 fingers wrapped up the barrel of the pencil, and their thumb is pressed straight into the pencil. This grasp is not just specific to students with Autism, as the kids who use it generally have weak fingers. The reason that…

Wikki Stix, in case you haven’t heard of them, are string that are covered in colored wax. They are bendable, sticky, but easily pulled apart, and can bring hours of entertainment. In fact, I am not sure what category they fit in because they are a handwriting activity, but they are also a craft, and…

One of our favorite games is the Ocean Animal Clothespin game, so I made a variation of the game named the Wild Animal Clothespin Game, with some different animals so the kids can enjoy working on finger strengthening using clothespins while having fun.  We also have some question cards and action cards to help have…

It is the beginning of the year, and it is time to see what the kids need to work on. When working on writing, I love to use the Mud Paper because it gives a very strong visual cue to work on making sure the letters are on the line. The kids love it when…

Many of the kids that I see for therapy have trouble with handwriting. Handwriting trouble stems from other problems such as fine motor problems, hand weakness, visual motor/visual perceptual problems, in-hand manipulation, and motor planning problems. One small thing that can help with handwriting is to get the hand in the right position to write…

I have been using my writing charms to get kids to work on stabilizing their hand when writing, and I wanted them to hold something a bit bigger than the cap erasers that I had on the original writing charms.  I came across this cool stretchy string, and attached it to a squishy toy ,…

When working on writing with kids, Occupational Therapists are not handwriting teachers. We do not teach handwriting, and we don not practice handwriting. What we do is we use our specialized skills to figure out where the trouble is coming from. We are very skilled at assessing movement, motor control, visual motor ability, and motor…

Getting back to basics today with coloring, cutting, gluing and writing. Decorating cookies is a fun activity but I can’t carry cookies around with me, so I made some cookies to decorate on paper. I made some cookies that you can color and practice writing lines on. Then you cut them out and glue them…

I love it when the kids get creative when they are writing, but it is sometimes so hard for them to come up with good ideas. Some kids can come up with some creative writing, and it is really fun to come up with funny stories one sentence at a time. You can read about…

I have tried out several apps that work on letter writing, but many of them are too “baby” like for the kids I am working with. Your Therapy Source suggested the Writing Wizard App, and I thought I would try it out.  I had already downloaded it, but hadn’t tried it yet. I have to…