Visual Closure Worksheets
Looking for more bug activities? Try these:
Looking for more bug activities? Try these:
Nests Nature Hunt for Kids from Still Playing School
Outside Arrays for Multiplication Practice from Line Upon Line Learning
Sidewalk Chalk Outdoor Math Game from Look! We’re Learning!
Gardening For Math Time from Preschool Powol Packets
Tree Unit Study and Science Experiment from Schooling a Monkey
This puzzle activity is a great in hand manipulation activity that develops letter recognition, fine motor skills, and other pre-literacy and fine motor development!
Kids just have no clue about the technical terms for the fine motor development that they go through. And that is normal and completely ok. Parents typically don’t even know what exactly is happening when their child picks up a handful of coins and as they squirrel them away in their chubby little palm before dropping them one by one into a piggy bank. All that matters is that the child is manipulating items, working their fine motor development, and having fun.
In-hand manipulation activities are a great way to boost fine motor skills needed for tasks like managing clothing fasteners, using a pencil when writing, manipulating items like coins or beads, and more.
This in-hand manipulation activity meets the fun expectation and works on so many fine motor skills. We practiced letter identification and made the activity work for my Toddler, too.
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We came up with a similar idea a few months back. It worked for today’s activity with a slight twist. In-hand manipulation is a powerful fine motor skill that that kids use for tasks like manipulating a pencil in writing activities, managing buttons and zippers, manipulating shoe laces, and holding and managing small items such as coins or beads. You can read much more about in-hand manipulation here.
To use puzzles in a fine motor activity like this one, you’ll need a small item such as dry split peas. Dry beans or field corn would also work for this type of activity. You’ll also need a wooden puzzle with edges.
For today’s activity, we used a Melissa and Doug wooden See Inside puzzle. This was perfect for our activity because the pictures hidden behind the split peas played peek-a-boo with us as we added the peas. My preschooler worked on her in-hand manipulation skills to fill up the letters by naming the letters and filling the letter space in proper-ish letter formation. I tried to show her how to fill in the letters with dry peas in the same order she would use to write the letter. This worked for most of the letters. If you are working on letter formation with your little one, show them how to fill in the top of the letters as they sprinkle in the beans or peas a little at a time.
An upper and lower case letter puzzle would be great for older kids who are working on forming lower case letters.
We did end up doing the same activity with my Toddler’s chunky pets animal puzzle. This graded activity was great for her in-hand manipulation development too and she got to work on animal identification and animal sounds as she filled up each animal space in the puzzle.
Are you working on in-hand manipulation for functional skill development? Here are a few more creative ideas that you will love:
This is a quick and easy way to build the skills needed for improving handwriting through more controlled pencil strokes. Pencil control is something we’ve covered in depth before. Kids can pick up a pencil and write quickly with scratchy letter formation or press too hard to form very dark letters.
We covered the best crayons for toddlers (and other ages) in a recent blog post that addresses the developmental benefits of various types of crayons. This can be a great starting point to help kids progress with underlying skills such as hand strength as well as the functional output; coloring, based on developmental levels and age.
They can miss lines and form letters in various sizes or write letters on top of one another. There are many (MANY) various reasons for each of these handwriting concerns. From inefficient fine motor strength, to visual perceptual difficulties, to proprioception needs…handwriting is a complex task!
Sometimes, the issue with poor handwriting is the child’s lack of pencil control. They might over-extend lines and need to improve precision in handwriting.
These easy crayon exercises are one way to work on pencil control. We’ve shared a similar activity recently using colored pencils and smaller circles that worked on precision of pencil movements. Today’s crayon exercises are just a little different and designed to build the motor movements of letter formation.
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For the first activity, simply draw 1/2 inch circles with various colors of crayons. Make the circles touch. Kids can draw an “x” inside the colors. I gave the instruction to keep the “x” inside the lines and use a different color than the color of the circle. This direction allows the child to slow down as they check the color and gives them a chance to become more aware of the lines of the circles.
We also used small pieces of crayons for this activity. Using small pieces of crayons is a great way to build the muscles needed for coloring and writing with controlled moments. I touched on the benefits of coloring a bit here.
Another quick pencil control exercise is coloring in 1/2 inch circles. For this exercise, ask your child to color the circles in specific ways. Show them how to color some circles with various crayon strokes. Coloring small areas with vertical crayon strokes, horizontal strokes, semi circle motions, diagonal lines, and circular crayon strokes mimics the lines of letter formation. Coloring the semi circles within the circle’s boundaries promotes the curved lines of letters like “c” and “a”. Be sure to show them how to start at the top for each circle and retrace their lines until most of the circle is filled in.
Here are a few more ideas that you can incorporate to improve pencil control. In the video below, we used colored pencils. Do these exercises with crayons, colored pencils, markers, chalk or anything!
Try this activity before a handwriting task to warm up the hands.
MORE handwriting ideas you will love:
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Cool Whip. All opinions are 100% mine.
“Can we have a snack?”
Do your kids like to snack constantly? Mine are allllllways hungry. Always. So, when I pulled out this Animal Cracker Oral Motor activity that we designed to address oral motor sensory processing, they were just a bit excited. Make that completely-jumping-and-cheering-excited. Anything that involves play and food makes the Best Thing of the Day column. It’s an oral motor exercise that kids will love. Why? Because it’s an out-of-the box way to work on oral motor skills for tasks like drinking from a straw, lip closure for safety when feeding, and sensory benefits of an oral motor activity.
We used animal crackers and a couple of straws to provide calming oral input. This was an easy way to add in an oral motor strengthening exercise, too. Here is some information on development of oral motor skills.
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Problems with oral motor skills can be an indication with feeding. That seems pretty obvious, right? But when there truly is a problem with oral motor skills and feeding, real issues can result. That’s why we wanted to cover a few big issues along with this oral motor activity. Be sure to check out that link to read more about the vast area of skills that make up oral motor processing and how it impacts feeding and other areas.
Sensory processing allows us to take in information from our environment and process it appropriately. Typically, we adjust to sensory input and adjust appropriately. Sensory input to a person’s mouth is no exception. We must process movement of the tongue, textures of food, adjust to drinking liquids, monitor and adjust the force required to bite and chew, and move our mouth/lips/tongue in order to speak.
When there is a difficulty with oral sensory processing, a child might drool excessively, chew on their shirt or hair, have difficulty eating certain foods, have trouble moving their tongue to swallow all of their food, show difficulty removing all of the food from a utensil, be unable to use a straw, refuse certain food textures or tastes, or have trouble with articulation in speech. Here are tips for kids who chew on everything.
Children with proprioceptive sensory needs may present as benefiting from calming, resistive activities. Sucking from a straw is one activity that involves the oral input and is typically effective in calming a overactive child.
First, a quick disclosure: Be sure to provide direct observation during this activity. Use judgement in deciding if this oral motor activity is right for the child or not. This activity and all others on this website are not intended as interventions. This is for educational purposes only. Consult your physician or medical professional when oral motor interventions and assessment is needed. The OT Toolbox is not liable for any action on your part. Your reading this website and webpage indicates your understanding.
For this calming activity, we used just a few items. Some brightly colored straws were the perfect tool for adding proprioceptive input to the mouth. I love the bright straws for their high contrast and tendency to draw the eyes toward the mid-line. When we added the learning portion to this activity, attention and precision were important so the bright colors helped.
You can find many fun oral sensory activities out there that involve blowing as a sensory processing activity. The one that we did used straw sucking as a way to add proprioceptive input. When a child sucks on a straw, their lips are forced to close while their cheek muscles tighten and the tongue retracts. This activity would be beneficial to a child who needs to build strength and endurance of the cheeks and muscles or a child who demonstrates tongue protrusion.
With the straw, I had my preschooler suck in order to pick up an animal cracker. She placed the straw flush on the cracker and sucked in order to pick the cracker off of the table. This was a real workout for her! She was able to figure out that turning the animal cracker over so that she placed the straw against it’s back side made the task easier. Sucking the animal cracker up off the table in order to move it provided a lot of calming proprioceptive input.
To grade this activity down (to make it easier for kids who are building their oral motor musculature and can not yet pick up the animal cracker), try smaller/lightweight crackers like Annie’s Homegrown Bunny crackers. These were much easier to move with the straw yet still provided sensory feedback to the mouth.
To add a bit of learning and motor planning to this activity, I provided a few small shape containers to the table. Ours were from a local dollar store, but these shape sorter shapes would work perfectly for addressing shape discrimination and actually comes in more options than the shapes that we talked about with our containers. We use these containers as lunch box compartments but the bright colors and shapes made a great shape recognition activity for her. She is working on identifying a triangle and rectangle and often times gets the two shapes mixed up. When she was doing this activity however, she was able to move the animal crackers and bunny crackers to the right shapes.
We practiced a bunch or rounds with this activity, because she loved it so much!
Looking for more animal cracker activities for learning and play? Try these ideas:
Gold Fish Measurement Math Game from Learning 2 Walk
Teach Preschoolers Fractions from Preschool Powol Packets
Jelly Bean Maths Game from Mum in the Madhouse
How Many Goldfish in the Bowl Game from Play & Learn Everyday
Cheerios Number Tracing from Schooling a Monkey
Fish Cracker Color Patterns from The Kindergarten Connection
Spring is in the air and simple sensory activities make play time memorable. I wanted to share a place where all of our Spring sensory activities could be found in one place. These are easy ways to play while addressing sensory needs with tactile sensory play. Getting messy in the dirt or exploring the scents of the season will bring sensory play to the basics. And what mom doesn’t like to hear about simple play ideas that build skills? Here are some of our favorite sensory ways to play this season:
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This Easy Spring Water Sensory Bin will help with eye-hand coordination while adding a scented sensory experience. It’s easy set-up and easy clean-up, too!
This Spring Sensory Bag is mess-free and addresses visual percepetual skills like scanning, eye-hand coordination, and proprioception. We created our sensory bag with a bug theme, but this is an activity that can be modified to many different areas.
A Dandelion Sensory Bin is an easy way to explore texture and the sense of touch. It’s an easy set-up sensory activity that is sure to build memories. My kids are still talking about this activity from last Spring.
Grow a Sensory Garden and touch all of the senses as you create your garden. The best thing about a sensory garden is that it is a sensory goldmine that lasts throughout the summer and fall, too!
Get MORE Spring sensory activities with our Spring Occupational Therapy ebook. It’s loaded with easy sensory ideas and will keep your kids playing with the senses all season long!
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