Today, I’ve got another virtual OT slide deck coming your way, featuring community helpers! These interactive activities are perfect for occupational teletherapy teletherapy or virtual lesson plans. This community helpers theme includes fine and gross motor based activities, handwriting prompts, a visual perception activity, mindfulness activities, a self-regulation check-in, and an eye-hand coordination activity.
This is a fun addition to our weekly therapy themes for themed occupational therapy sessions.
Community Helpers
Community worker themes are popular in lesson plans in schools and homeschooling. Occupational therapists can compliment educational studies with this community helper lesson plan that offers movement and functional tasks that go along with the theme.
Community helpers might include:
- Firefighters
- Police officers
- Postal workers
- Transportation employees
- Trash collectors
- Nurses
- Doctors
- Teachers
- Occupational therapists!
- Physical therapists
- Speech therapists
- Construction workers
- Any worker in the community!
Use this list and the community helper writing prompts in the slide deck to come up with the neighborhood helpers kids strive to be when they grow up!
Community Helpers Slide Deck
If you’ve been following The OT Toolbox, then you may have seen a few of our other interactive slide decks. Therapists are LOVING these therapy slide decks for their themed activities that help kids build skills, while in virtual or hybrid environments.
You can grab the other free slide decks here on our teletherapy and free resources page.
Today’s slide deck includes several community helpers activities:
Community Helpers Warm-Up Activity- Use the firefighter’s firehoses to work on deep breathing as a mindfulness and coping tool to warm-up for this activity. Kids can move the interactive portion of the slide along the firehose to work on eye-hand coordination and visual tracking, too.
Community Helpers Writing Prompts– Use the community workers writing prompts for creative writing and handwriting practice. Kids can use the self-check writing list to check their written work for accuracy with letter formation, line use, spacing, and size.
Community Helpers Sign Language– This fine motor workout is pretty fun! Click through the links to learn sign language for some community workers. This activity works on fine motor skills, bilateral coordination, finger isolation, motor planning, and eye-hand coordination.
Community Helpers Visual Perception Activity– Count the different helpers on the community workers puzzle page and type the number in the text box. This activity works on visual perceptual skills such as form constancy, visual discrimination, and figure ground, visual scanning.
Community Helpers Gross Motor Activity– Use the deep breathing and movement prompts to integrate mindfulness with gross motor as kids gain a big breath in with extended lung and rib cage/shoulder girdle expansion. Then, reach far down to push out that deep breath. This slide uses a community worker theme with common trucks found in the community.
Community Helper Activity for Self-Regulation– The final slide in this activity deck is a self-regulation check-in that can be used to close the session. Check in on how your child’s body feels and acts, as well as their emotions. This is a good time to work on some coping tools or strategies that can carry out of the session, too.
Does this looks like a fun way to spend a therapy session while working on skills?
You can grab a copy of this Google slide deck and use it to work on specific skills.
Enter your email address below and you will receive a PDF containing a link to copy the slide deck onto your Google drive. Save that PDF file, because you can come back to it again and again and send it to the kids on your caseload (or classroom) so they can make their own copy on their Google drive.
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.
