More Movement Resources

heavy work movement activity cards

AWESOME! Your free dinosaur proprioception activity cards are in your email inbox.

But wait, would you like to add the benefits of heavy work to home programs, play, indoor activities, and outdoor fun?

Click here to get 88 heavy work activities with 11 themes to add movement and proprioception activities to play, learning, and therapy sessions.

heavy work movement activity cards

As a special thank you for grabbing the Dinosaur Proprioception Activity Cards, this set of heavy work activity cards is available at a discounted price. This collection of 11 heavy work activity cards are combined into themed cards so you can add heavy work to everyday play.

In the set of cards, you’ll find heavy work activities in the following themes:

1. Trucks Heavy Work Activities

2. Insects Heavy Work Activities

3. Sea Animals Heavy Work Activities

4. Farm Animals Heavy Work Activities

5. Jungle Animals Heavy Work Activities

6. Woodland Animals Heavy Work Activities

7. Superheros Heavy Work Activities

8. Sports Heavy Work Activities

9. Monsters Heavy Work Activities

10. Summer Heavy Work Activities

11. Butterfly Life Cycle Heavy Work Activities

Each activity page includes 8 movement and heavy work cards in that theme.

These heavy work activities can be added to home programs, teletherapy activity plans, or used as brain breaks during learning and play.

Heavy Work Activities to Help Kids

Heavy work activities help kids with a variety of needs:

  • Who appear clumsy and need help with motor planning or body awareness.
  • Fidget when asked to sit quietly.
  • Show an increased activity level or arousal level.
  • Seek intense proprioceptive input by “crashing and bashing” into anything.
  • Slap their feet when walking.
  • Flap hands.
  • Use too much or too little force on pencils, scissors, objects, and people.
  • “No fear” when jumping or walking down stairs.
  • Or, are overly fearful of walking down steps/jumping.
  • Look at their body parts (hands/feet) when completing simple tasks.
  • Sit down too hard or miss chairs when sitting.
  • Fall out of their seat.
  • Fluctuates between over-reacting and under-reacting in response to stimulation.
  • Constantly on the move.
  • Slow to get moving and then fatigue easily.

Use these heavy work cards to help with building awareness in body awareness, motor planning abilities, proprioceptive input, or a movement activity as a brain break to pay attention between learning activities.

Click HERE to get the special sale price on these heavy work activity cards.

HEAvy work as a brain break

Brain breaks are a powerful and effective way to address regulation needs, help with attention, and impact learning into the classroom. Learning can be exhaustive to our kids. They are struggling through the day’s activities while sometimes striving to pay attention through sensory processing issues or executive functioning needs. Brain breaks, or movement breaks can be used as part of a sensory diet or in a whole-classroom activity between classroom tasks. 

Arrive here by accident or by searching for dinosaur related activities for kids? No problem. Just click on the link above to grab your free dinosaur proprioception activity cards.

Easter Egg Game- Color Scavenger Hunt

Easter egg game that kids will love while working on color matching, color identification, visual perception.

If you are looking for a fun Easter egg game that the kids will love, then you are in luck. Add this activity to your Easter activities and use up a few of those plastic eggs. This color scavenger hunt uses plastic Easter eggs, and it’s a very fun way to play and learn!

Use those plastic eggs to encourage gross motor skills, visual perception, and color learning in a way that kids won’t forget. While the kiddos are playing this Easter game, they are building cognitive skills AND underlying skill areas like visual scanning and other visual perceptual skills.

Easter egg game that kids will love while working on color matching, color identification, visual perception.

Easter Egg game

We set this Easter activity up years and years ago. (2013 to be exact!) However, it’s one of those activities that stands the test of time. If you’ve got plastic Easter eggs on hand, use them to build skills like the ones we worked on here!

This Easter egg activity helps kids learn colors and learning with a color scavenger hunt gross motor activity

COLOR SCAVENGER HUNT

This color scavenger hunt is so easy to set up…and so much fun. Kids can work on identifying color names, and color matching. I wrote different colors on slips of paper and put them into plastic eggs.  The kids got to pick an egg from the bowl and “sound out” the color on the slip of paper.  Ok, my 5 year old sounded out the color with help.  The other two said the first letter of the word and guessed the color.  They were pretty excited to “read” the color on their slip of paper!  

Another idea to expand this activity is to write words and do an Easter egg version of our word scavenger hunt.

Kids will love this Easter egg game using plastic Easter eggs in a color scavenger hunt activity.
Use this color scavenger hunt with easter eggs to work on color matching and color identification with kids.

An Easter Game Kids will Love

Now for the egg game…So then, they had to run off and find something that was the color of the written word on their slip of paper…and it had to FIT inside the egg.    I sat and waited for them to run back and show me what they found while they tried to fit it in their egg.   (completely genius way for this mom to finish a cup of coffee!)  

Kids can look for objects that match plastic Easter eggs in a color scavenger hunt that allows them them move and play with learning, too.

They had a little trouble with some things, but this was a fun and different way to work on visual perceptual skills.  Will that little doll fit in the egg?  We weren’t sure by looking at it, but with a little fiddling, she did!   Fitting the eggs together with the little objects inside was a great fine motor exercise.

Kids can look for matching colors in this plastic Easter egg game that helps them with color matching and visual scanning.

Color Identification for Kids  

They found something for each color!  

Putting items into the eggs and then matching colors was a great way to work on color identification skills.

Matching colors requires visual motor skills to match colors and use that recognition in identifying the name of the color. It’s a skill that requires visual memory as well as working memory. This skill then carries over to so many other areas like letter recognition, and so much more.

Learning colors is a building block for learning in kids!

Kids can play this color scavenger hunt game with plastic Easter eggs for a fun Easter game that can be played indoors or outdoors.
Kids can learn color names and work on learning skills like visual scanning, fine motor skills, and gross motor skills with this Easter game.

This Easter themed play activity could be modified in so many ways for learning words, colors…have fun with it 🙂

Want more ways to play and learn this time of year?

One resource we love is our $5 therapy kit…the Plastic Egg Therapy Kit! It has 27 printable pages of activities with an Easter egg theme. In the kit, you’ll find fine motor activities, handwriting prompts, letter formation pages, pencil control sheets, plastic egg activities, matching cards, graphing activities, STEM fine motor task cards, and more. There are several pages of differentiated lines to meet a variety of needs. This therapy kit has everything done for you.

Get your copy of the Easter Egg Therapy Kit here.

This time of year, one of our more popular products here on The OT Toolbox is our Spring Occupational Therapy packet. The best news is that, this packet has had a major upgrade from it’s previous collection of spring sensory activities.

Another great tool for supporting skills is the Spring OT packet…

In the Spring OT packet, you’ll now find:

  • Spring Proprioceptive Activities
  • Spring Vestibular Activities
  • Spring Visual Processing Activities
  • Spring Tactile Processing Activities
  • Spring Olfactory Activities
  • Spring Auditory Processing Activities
  • Spring Oral Motor Activities
  • Spring Fine Motor Activities
  • Spring Gross Motor Activities
  • Spring Handwriting Practice Prompts
  • Spring Themed Brain Breaks
  • Occupational Therapy Homework Page
  • Client-Centered Worksheet
  • 5 pages of Visual Perceptual Skill Activities

All of the Spring activities include ideas to promote the various areas of sensory processing with a Spring-theme. There are ways to upgrade and downgrade the activities and each activities includes strategies to incorporate eye-hand coordination, bilateral coordination, body scheme, oculomotor control, visual perception, fine and gross motor skills, and more.

THE BEST THING ABOUT THE SPRING ACTIVITY PACKET:

One of my favorite parts of the Spring Occupational Therapy Packet is the therapist tool section:

  • Occupational Therapy Homework Page
  • Client-Centered Worksheet

These two sheets are perfect for the therapist looking to incorporate carryover of skills. Use the homework page to provide specific OT recommended activities to be completed at home. This is great for those sills that parents strive to see success in but need more practice time for achieving certain skill levels.
This activity packet is 26 pages long and has everything you need to work on the skills kids are struggling with…with a Spring theme!

Here’s the link again to grab that packet.

Use this Spring Occupational Therapy Activities Packet to work on occupational therapy goals and functional skills with a spring theme.

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.