Welcome to the Shop. There are so many great products out there and I wanted to put together my favorites. These are affiliate links, meaning I will receive a percentage of the purchase, at no cost to you. I do want to say, though that I only share products that I stand behind. These are books and resources that will be an asset to childhood development, education, and Occupational Therapy goal areas.
This Fine Motor Paper Clip Math idea is a fine motor math activity that makes for a great busy bag or calm down time activity. It’s perfect for indoor playtime and hands-on learning. Not only that, but it is a great way to work on fine motor skills like thumb opposition.
An open thumb web space is a skill is needed for manipulating items like a pencil or crayon, shoe laces, zippers, buttons, and small objects with an open web space. Often times, we see kids who have their thumb squashed up against their fingers and the side of their palm when they are writing or manipulating items. This opposition fine motor activity is a fun way to work on opening up the web space for improved dexterity.
I love how the two sets linked above (both affiliate links) are all colors of the rainbow. Even better for color matching and color recognition for preschoolers!
So, this activity is completely simple to do: Spread out the paper clips and ask your child to match them up to the craft sticks.
We worked on a few learning activities with this:
Add the number of paper clips.
Add the total number of paper clips on two craft sticks.
Subtract the difference of the number of paper clips on two craft sticks.
One to one correspondence
More than/less than
Work on color matching and color recognition
Work on fine motor skills.
Thumb Opposition Fine Motor Activity
Using the Foam Craft Sticks makes this activity a real workout for the fingers. You could use wooden craft sticks that provide more support and are easier to manage. But, to really challenge the fine motor skills, the foam craft sticks are the thing to use! They are a little wiggly and require stability of the thenar muscles (muscles of the thumb) to hold the thumb in place as the fingers and the tip of the thumb place the paper clip on the craft stick.
When opposing, the thumb’s thenar muscles work to oppose the pointer finger during functional tasks. This is needed for advancing and positioning a pencil when writing, managing a button with ease, and pulling a zipper. With a closed thumb web space and lateral pinch of the thumb versus true opposition, a child will fumble.
When doing this opposition activity with your child, be sure to verbally prompt them to attend to the bend thumb IP joint, like we talked about in this post.
This is such an easy way to learn and play indoors. Looking for more indoor play ideas? Try these:
Working on the underlying pre-writing skills of handwriting is SO important in handwriting. This pre-writing lines activity is a fun Easter occupational therapy activity, but it’s also a powerful tool for building the foundation for handwriting. This is one of our favorite Wikki Stix activities to support pre-writing development.
You know we like to share handwriting activities around here, right? This Easter egg pre-writing activity is a fun way for young children to work on pre-writing skills in order to build a base for letter formation and pencil control. While we made this activity an Easter egg-ish shape, you could do this activity any time of year and use any shape to work on pencil control within a confined space.
Preschoolers and Toddlers will love this early handwriting activity! All of these skills are needed before a child can form letters and work on line awareness in Kindergarten. If a child is showing difficulty with forming diagonals in letters like “A” or “M”, this would be a fun way to work on building the skill for improved legibility in written work.
Using THIS Dry Erase Board worked out great for this activity, because we did the same writing activity on the reverse side, which has a chalkboard. Writing with small pieces of chalk is a fantastic fine motor and intrinsic muscle strengthening activity to work on the fine motor skills needed for endurance in drawing and coloring, as well as the tripod grasp needed for an appropriate grasp on the pencil. A chalkboard surface for drawing lines is much more resistant than a smooth dry erase surface, providing more feedback during line formation.
We used these Dry Erase Markers for their fine point and colorful selection, which made making these Easter eggs a creative activity, too. My preschooler loved picking out the colors to create patterns. The last item we needed for this handwriting precursor activity was (Amazon affiliate link) Wikki Stix. As an Occupational Therapist, I feel like I’m always pushing the benefits of Wikki Stix. The bendable and mold-able sticks are a great fine motor and handwriting tool. In this activity, I bent one or two wikki stix into an egg shape. You could also make circles, squares, or any shape for your handwriting task.
Developmental Progression of Pre-Writing Strokes
As a child develops, they are typically able to copy lines and shapes with increasing accuracy. Here are the general ages of development for pre-writing lines:
Age 2- Imitates a vertical line from top to bottom
Age 2-Imitates a Horizontal Line
Age 2-Imitates a Circle
Age 3- Copies (After being shown a model) a Vertical Line from top to bottom
Age 3 Copies a Horizontal Line from left to right
Age 3- Imitates a Cross
Age 4- Copies a Cross
Age 4- Copies a Right and Left Diagonal Line
Age 4- Copies a Square
Age 4- Copies an “X”
Age 5- Copies a Triangle
The developmental progression of these shapes allows for accuracy and success in letter formation.
Get a FREE Developmental Progression of Pre-Writing Strokes printable HERE.
Easter Egg Pre-Writing Strokes Activity
For this activity, we used the Wikki Stix to right on the dry erase board. I created egg shaped ovals with the wikki stix. I then showed my preschooler how to draw lines across the eggs to create patterns and designs.
We practiced horizontal lines (going from left to right) and vertical lines (going from top to bottom). We also added circles within the boundaries of the wikki stix and diagonal lines, too.
The physical border provided by the wikki stix gave a nice area and cue for pencil control. Try doing this activity with progressing level of developmental line skill. You can also work on writing letters inside the wikki stix to build spatial and size awareness in handwriting.
Extend the activity:
Use the wikki sticks to do this activity on paper or a chalkboard. Other ideas might be using crayons, markers, or a grease pencil for more feedback through resistance and proprioceptive input to the hands.
More Pre-writing Lines Activities
Some of my favorite Handwriting activities are multi-sensory and incorporate motor planning activities for building pre-writing lines as a foundation for handwriting:
Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!
Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
Sometimes, it’s fun to make handwriting practice a little bit different. This magnetic letter activity was a fun way to work on letter identification and letter formation in handwriting. For young children, becoming more familiar with letters and the alphabet is key to age-appropriate literacy. This refers to knowing a letter’s name, the letter’s sound, and the formation of letters. My preschooler is getting more familiar with letter recognition as an age-appropriate pre-literacy strategy by listening to books and pointing out letters that we see. Similarly, these same strategies are appropriate for the kindergarten age, but adding in letter formation.
Preschoolers can use this activity to work on writing uppercase letters and kindergarten-aged students can work on lower case letters with this activity. Extend this play to older kids by asking them to write words using the magnetic letters.
This is a great eye hand coordination activity for toddlers and preschoolers that are learning how to hold a spoon.
And, I have to tell you that using a spoon in handwriting is always a hit with kids of any age!
Magnetic Letter and Spoons Handwriting Practice
This post contains affiliate links.
We have a bin full of magnetic letters from over the years. I used a set like this in my school-based OT activities and magnetic letters have always been on our refrigerator starting when when my 8 year old was a toddler.
To play this handwriting game, fill a small bin or bowl with magnetic letters. This brand worked well with our spoons activity because they were lighter. A magnetic letter like Melissa & Doug magnets worked, but they were just a bit too heavy to stick to our spoons. We have a few sets of dollar store magnetic letters that worked well with our spoons, too.
Letter Formation Handwriting Game
I pulled out a few of our spoons. Now, I wish I could tell you the brand and metal make-up of our spoons, but they are 12 years old and I have no clue about that info. Apparently some stainless steel spoons are magnetic and others are not depending on the processing the metal has undergone. You could try a few different utensils in your house with this activity, like ladles or serving spoons. If none of these options work for holding the magnets, simply use a magnetic wand.
I had my kids take turns stirring the letters with their spoons. They pulled out their spoon one at a time and looked at the letter they grabbed. I had them tell me the name of the letter and then practice writing it. This was a hit with all of the ages!
Crayon play dough is one of our favorite homemade play dough recipes! Here, we have all of our versions of crayon play dough recipes in one place! We know the benefits of play dough as a therapy tool, but when it comes to play dough made with crayons, there are even more!
Broken crayons were taking over my house.
A pencil case of broken pieces, a drawer full of crayon wrappers, pencil pouches with snapped colored pencils among wrapper-less crayons. Our house could have been a candle-making factory with all of the colorful crayon bits that were everywhere.
(Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.)
Our day started out like any other: we had a fun book to read, about a boy with a purple crayon, and a mission to create a fun activity based on the classic children’s book. I rifled through our craft shelves, looking for inspiration. A broken crayon bounced on the floor. These crayons are multiplying faster than the dust bunnies in our house!
Then it hit me: Crayons. Play Dough. And a fun activity based on a favorite book was born.
We made crayon play dough. And couldn’t stop. We made crayon play dough in every color of the rainbow. We made play dough with every color in the crayon box. And we added fun things, too.
Crayon Play Dough became an instant hit in our house! And you all loved it too. We shared it on Facebook and Instagram and you emailed me about your concoctions. So, I knew we needed to have all of our crayon play dough ideas in one place. So here you are:
How to make play dough with broken crayons:
Each of the crayon play dough recipes below have one main ingredient…crayons! With a few additions, these play dough recipes are some very sensory-based play strategies to develop finger and hand strength in kids.
Crayon Salt Dough Combining salt dough with our play dough recipe, this dough is a fun way to change things up a bit.
Patriotic Crayon Salt Dough Why not make the salt dough patriotic? We made fun star garlands with this dough.
And not a crayon play dough, but a sensory art activity based on the children’s book, The Day the Crayons Quit: Crayon Shaving Art
Don’t want to use your crayons to make play dough? No problem! Broken crayons still color! Here are the many benefits of coloring with crayons. Because as an Occupational Therapist, I love the fine motor good that coloring with crayons brings!
Did you know there is a developmental progression to pre-writing strokes? Before children can form letters, they need the developmental ability to form straight and diagonal lines, shapes, and intersecting lines. Before children are developmentally able to form and copy letters and numbers, they need the pre-writing skills.
Developmental prgression of pre-writing strokes
Pre-writing strokes refer to the lines that young children need to form before they are developmentally capable of writing letters. Pre writing strokes include straight lines, diagonal lines, and shapes.
Below, you can get a PDF of developmental progression of pre-writing lines and the handwriting skills by age for young children.
Get your FREE printable of Developmental Progression of Pre-Writing Lines HERE.
Want to know more? Here’s the activity we did to go along with this free resource: Pre-Writing Lines Activity
For comprehensive information on the developmental progression of handwriting, check out The Handwriting Book.
Want to know more about The Handwriting Book? Click on the image above to find out how to address every underlying area related to handwriting skills. Click here to BUY NOW.
As an Occupational Therapist, I LOVE using clay with my kids in fine motor work. Clay uses a resistance that works the small muscles of the hands and builds arch development on the hands, increasing endurance for activities like coloring and writing for longer periods of time. Kids will often times complain of their hands being tired when they color. They will press very lightly or switch colors overly-often, allowing themselves to sneak in breaks from coloring. A strengthening activity like using clay is a great way to build the strength of the intrinsic muscles.
Manipulating a pencil with minute movements is essential for handwriting. Clay is perfect for fine tuning pencil control in a fun way!
Create a flat disk with the clay. Use a pencil to write in the clay. Practice letter formation.
Roll the Clay
into a “snake”. Poke a pencil into the clay, encouraging a tripod grasp on the pencil.
Roll small balls of clay between the thumb and pointer finger and ring finger.
Create a thick “stick” with the clay. Show your child how to rotate the clay and twirl it between the thumb and fingers.
Use Clay Cleaning Tool Set for utensil use while providing verbal cues for appropriate grasp. NOTE: Using utensils like these may not encourage tripod grasp due to the nature of the tools. They will improve intrinsic strength and open web space.
Press a pencil eraser into the clay.
Create a flat disk from the clay. Place a piece of paper on top of the paper. Practice writing on the paper, encouraging your child to write lightly enough to not poke the pencil point through the paper. This is an exercise in proprioception for the hands.
This ABC play dough activity is a fun way to build hand strength with letters of the alphabet. This Fine Motor Play Dough Alphabet activity combined a couple of our favorite things: Creative Play Dough ideas and Fine Motor Skills. We used a handful of foam alphabet stickers that we had in the house and store bought play dough to make letters that we used in spelling words, letter identification, and alphabetical ordering. And our play dough fun rating was 26 letters long!
ABC Play Dough Activity
Sometimes, you need play dough in your day. Other times, you need to turn up the play dough fun notch just a bit. (That’s a thing, right? The play dough fun scale? I think so.)
Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.
So, we received these foam letter stickers and have been using them in a bunch of fun ways. Today, we used them with plain old fashioned Play-Doh.
Fine Motor Skills and Play Dough
Every Occupational Therapist knows the benefits of play dough is so huge that they recommend it as a top-rated tool for fine motor development. We’ve shared a ton of fine motor activities using play dough and I absolutely love to play with play dough with my kids for it’s use in fine motor skill development and hand strengthening.
Play dough is perfect for refining skills like intrinsic muscles strength, finger isolation, tripod grasp development, thumb opposition, opening up the web space, bilateral hand coordination, and more. With this activity, we specifically hit developing the intrinsic muscle strength of the hands.
Intrinsic muscle strength and play dough
So, what is intrinsic muscle strength? There are seventeen muscles in the hand that are responsible for fine motor skills and precision grasp, among other things like moving the thumb and fingers. There are different groups of intrinsic muscles and they allow us to grasp items in a functional way. The muscles of the hands work in conjunction with the muscles that originate in the forearm. These extrinsic muscles end in your hand.
For this activity, we used different colors of play dough and created small round balls of dough. I asked my kids (and a niece and nephew who were over for the day) to roll small, dime-sized balls using just their thumb and fingers.
Rolling small balls of this size uses the intrinsic muscles that are responsible for moving the thumb (thenar muscles) and the muscles that bend the fingers at the knuckle (lumbricals). Also needed for a task like this are the palmer interossi muscles that work to move the fingers in a flexed position toward the thumb.
So, when a child is rolling a small ball of dough, with their thumb and fingers, they are working on strengthening the muscles that a child uses to write and color with a pencil or crayon.
Weakness in Writing the ABC’s
Sometimes kids complain of their hand hurting when coloring or you might see them switch crayons very often when coloring.
These are signs of a weakness of hand strength. Other signs of intrinsic muscle weakness are a weak grasp on the pencil or writing very lightly with a pencil.
After we rolled all of the play dough balls, we used our foam letter stickers to press letters into the Play-Doh. Pressing the letters with an extended finger (like in the picture) is a great way to work on finger isolation. It is important to note that using the finger in an extended “pointer” uses the extrinsic muscles that originate in the forearm.
We used these letters to practice spelling words with my second grader, identify sight words for my Kindergartner, practice letter identification and letter order with my preschooler, and practice not eating play dough with my toddler 😉
We received ours from 
(Amazon affiliate link)
worked well with our spoons activity because they were lighter. A magnetic letter like 
magnets worked, but they were just a bit too heavy to stick to our spoons. We have a few sets of dollar store magnetic letters that worked well with our spoons, too.
.
(affiliate link)
