February 19, 2021

Rainbow Breathing

February 23, 2023February 19, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

Adding to our deep breathing exercises here on the site, is this rainbow breathing activity for kids. It’s a breathing exercise that kids can use in a rainbow theme in therapy sessions, or as a coping tool to help kids with self-regulation, mindfulness, and focus. Print off this rainbow breathing printable and add it to your deep breathing activities!

This rainbow breathing activity is a great mindfulness tool to use with other rainbow activities. You can even add some Rainbow Fruit Loop craft ideas for fine motor fun.

Free rainbow breathing deep breathing exercise for kids

Rainbow Breathing Activity

Kids will love this printable rainbow breathing activity. It makes a great poster for a therapy room, classroom, of homeschool room, too, especially this time of year.

There are many benefits to breath control in breathing exercise as coping tools, and there is a reason why we are seeing more need for these types of resources.

To use this free deep breathing printable, ask kids to start at the white dot on one side of the rainbow. They can slowly trace along the colors of the rainbow as they take a deep breath.

Then, when they reach the other side of the rainbow, they can begin at another white dot where they can trace along another color in the rainbow. Ask kids to trace in rainbow order.

Rainbow meditation

You can extend this rainbow breathing activity by incorporating rainbow meditation into this mindfulness activity.

Ask children breathe deeply, they can focus on the breaths that they are taking in and noting how their body slows down to an alert and ready state. Rainbow meditation exercises involve using the colors of the rainbow ask children focus on each color along with mindful thoughts.

For each color, ask the child to focus on the color of the rainbow as they breathe in or breathe out. They can think about an object that is that color in nature or in their environment.

To help the child focus on the benefits of guided meditation with this rainbow activity, ask the child to visualize the rainbow colors flowing through them with each deep breath.

Red-They can take a deep breath in as they trace along the red band of the rainbow. Ask them to think about red things as they visualize red flowing through their body. Some things that are red might be hot and warm. Can they “feel” warmth flowing through their body? They can picture the color coming in through their nose and flowing through their body.

Orange- As the child traces along the orange band of the rainbow, the child can picture orange objects. They can breathe deeply out through their mouth as they picture orange colors of the rainbow flowing through their arms and legs and then out through their mouth. Things that are orange might be warm and energy. Can they “feel” warmth and safety flowing through their body?

Yellow- Ask the child to trace along the yellow band of the rainbow. They should be taking a deep breath in through their nose again. Ask the child to picture yellow items. Can they visualize the flow of yellow as it courses through their body? Yellow things might be bright and sunny. Do they feel alert and awake?

Green- Next, kids can trace along the green band of the rainbow. As they do, ask the child to breathe out through their mouth. They can then picture green things and imagine the green of the rainbow is flowing through their body. Green can be bright, soothing, and energetic. Do they feel that flowing through their body?

Blue- The next color in the rainbow is blue. Ask the child to trace along the rainbow band and breathe in through their nose. Blue might be calming, or peaceful thoughts. Can they feel calm colors flowing through their body? What are some blue things they can picture?

Purple- Finally, ask the child to trace along the purple band as they breath out through their mouth. Ask them to picture purple flowing through their body. Purple can mean creative and awareness. Can they picture any purple objects?

Free Rainbow Breathing Printable

Want to add this printable exercise sheet to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below and you’ll be on your way.

More breathing exercises you’ll love:

Heart deep breathing exercise

Pencil deep breathing exercise

Clover deep breathing exercise

Color Exercises

January 3, 2023February 19, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

Looking to get kids moving and building skills in therapy sessions or at home? These color exercises use all the colors of the rainbow to help kids move and strengthen gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and even visual motor skills! Add these whole body exercises use colors as a therapy theme, but I love that the colorful exercise activities get kids strengthening muscle groups in big and small ways.

This therapy activity slide deck is one of the many free slides available here on the site, as a resource for teletherapy, home programs, and therapy planning!

Be sure to grab the free I Spy Colors therapy slide deck, too. For a hands-on activity, be sure to use our color by letter worksheet.

Related resource- Working with kids in teletherapy? Need streamlined info on how to structure your sessions? Need activities for week-to-week therapy planning? need answers for all of your teletherapy questions? Join the free teletherapy course, a 5 day email series on telehealth for occupational therapists.

Color exercises

This is a color learning activity, that can be used in teletherapy sessions to develop many skill areas:

Gross Motor Color Exercises

All of these gross motor skill areas can be addressed using the color activities in this slide deck:

Gross motor skills
Core strength
Bilateral coordination
Crossing midline
Core strength
Stability
Balance and equilibrium skills
Coordination
Range of motion
Flexibility
Motor planning
Crossing midline
Movement patterns
Posture and postural control
Muscle tone
Proprioceptive input
Vestibular input

As kids go through the slides, they need to complete various stretches, challenging the skills listed above. There are movement patterns, crossing midline activities, yoga positions, and more. Kids can go through these slides several times if you like, to work on motor planning, sequencing, and memory skills.

Then, the slides ask the child to air write letters. This is an eye-hand coordination activity that incorporates shoulder positioning and strengthening, finger isolation, and crossing midline, motor planning, range of motion.

These slides also work on visual perceptual skills including visual closure as kids identify the hidden letter.

Grade and extend this activity:

Challenge kids by calling out a color and they can complete that gross motor activity.

Having the child air write the letter associated with the color and writing the letter larger or smaller, using whole arm motions, or just the finger.

Challenge kids by calling out a color and asking them to air write the letter.

Or ask kids to complete the air writing task while in the gross motor stretch activity.

Fine Motor Color Exercises

This slide deck challenges fine motor skills as well. Kids can use their finger and work on finger isolation as they write the letters on each of the color slides.

There is another movement section of the slide deck that incorporates colored letters with a fine motor activity. All students will need is a piece of paper (scratch paper works, so tell them to grab an old homework page or even a piece of junk mail) and their hands.

Following the directions on the fine motor activity slides, they will tear the paper into small pieces using their hands to tear and crumble. Tearing paper with the hands and using the finger tips to crumble small bits of paper strengthens the intrinsic muscles of the hands. Here is more information on tearing paper as a fine motor activity.

This activity works on fine motor skills:

Arch development
Intrinsic hand strength
Open thumb web space
Hand strength
Dexterity
Precision
Graded tearing- eye hand coordination
Separation of the sides of the hand

Then, you can extend this activity to use it in different ways or to challenge kids of all levels and ages:

Use different colored paper to match with different letter activities and gross motor exercises in the first part of the slide deck.
Use different grades of paper to make the exercise more difficult. Heavy weight paper like construction paper, cardstock, or paper plates is more of a challenge and lighter weight paper like thing paper, wrapping paper, wax paper, or tissue paper is easier.
Encourage children to use only the very tips of one hand.
Ask kids to write a letter on the small piece of paper and then crumble it up so the letter is hidden.

Visual Motor Exercise with Colors

Finally, the last part of this slide deck is a visual motor exercise. Children can use those small pieces of paper to copy the lines and letters on the slides.

This activity includes strait lines for younger children to incorporate pre-writing lines. There are also letters included for kids working on forming letters.

Extend this activity

Matching letters to the exercises at the beginning of the deck.
Kids could also form letters using the paper balls by memory rather than copying the letter forms.

The slide deck ends with a color self regulation exercise. Kids can choose the color that matches their feelings, alert state, and regulation needs, all with a rainbow color theme!

Virtual Color Exercise Activities

Want this free therapy slide deck? Enter your email into the form below. Grab the free Google slide deck by entering your email into the form below. You will receive a PDF containing a link to open the slide deck. Be sure you are logged into your Google account before clicking the button on that PDF. Save the PDF in your therapy files so you can access this resource any time and share with those on your caseload.

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.

I Spy Colors Activity

January 3, 2023February 19, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

If you’ve ever played “I Spy with my Little Eye”, then you are going to love this I Spy colors therapy slide deck. It’s a movement activity that gets kids up and moving and challenges several developmental skill areas: visual processing, tactile sensory exploration, handwriting, and strength, endurance, and movement challenges. Kids can go through the free therapy slide deck in an occupational therapy teletherapy session and work on learning colors as well. Add I Spy colors as a color scavenger hunt that kids will love!

Use this along with our color exercises slide deck for more color theme activities in therapy.

This I Spy virtual game is just one of the free slide decks we have available here on the site. You’ll also love our printable color by letter worksheet. Check them all out!

Need more teletherapy resources? Working with kids in teletherapy? Need streamlined info on how to structure your sessions? Need activities for week-to-week therapy planning? need answers for all of your teletherapy questions? Join the free teletherapy course, a 5 day email series on telehealth for occupational therapists.

I Spy Colors

The kids you are working with may have played I Spy before. In a traditional look-and-find game, they need to search a book, puzzle page, or other activity page for hidden items. You may have even played I Spy with my little eye while waiting at a doctor’s office, or in a restaurant. It’s a good activity for kids that keeps them busy. But did you know there are even more therapeutic benefits to this game?

I wanted to create a teletherapy activity that required no materials other than paper and pencil. This I Spy Colors therapy slide deck does the trick.

Therapists can use this free interactive slide deck in therapy treatment sessions virtually as a color scavenger hunt activity.

The activity asks users to search their house for an object of a particular color. By looking around the home for the color detail of objects, children are strengthening several visual perceptual skill areas:

Visual scanning– moving the eyes for a specific aspect of details: colors of objects. Visual scanning is a skill needed for reading as kids scan their eyes over the lines of a page.
Visual discrimination– visually determining differences in colors of objects. The slides ask kids to locate items that are in a range of colors. This color activity is slightly more advanced than just finding a blue item. Can they find teal? Visual discrimination is a skill needed for distinguishing differences in letters and words when reading.
Figure-ground– Pulling out details of objects from a busy background. When users scan their home for a specific color, they are visually identifying objects that may be hidden in a busy background. This visual skill is used in functional tasks every day.
Visual memory– Holding a “picture” of details such as the shade of color in the mind. As kids look throughout their room or home, visual memory is needed to recall the color and shade they are looking for. This visual skill is needed in reading and math.
Visual closure– identifying an object when only parts of it are seen. This visual perceptual skill is used when children locate an object in the room that may be partially hidden. Visual closure is used in reading when readers are able to identify a word by only some of the letters.
Visual convergence– A visual processing skill, this motor task allows vision to shift in scanning. By scanning to near and far points, kids are strengthening this skill. Visual convergence is used in the classroom when scanning from a teacher or the board to the desk, or from near to far and far to near.

Users can then identify features of the object by responding to questions about texture. The slide deck asks about aspects of the found item by asking the child to explore the tactile aspect. Is the item fuzzy? Soft? Rough? How does it feel?

This part of the color activity brings in features of the tactile sensory system.

Virtual I Spy

This virtual I Spy activity takes the fun of the classic look and find game online, making it great for teletherapy activities with kids of all ages. This particular color game goes beyond just “I Spy” however…

Use the virtual activity for working on other areas in therapy, too:

Movement challenges- Kids get up and move to find the objects
Visual perceptual skills- covered above
Tactile sensory exploration and challenges- Can they find a green object that is fuzzy? This activity can be expanded in many ways!
Handwriting- work on skills such as line awareness, letter formation, sizing, legibility. Kids can then self-assess their work, making carryover of writing skills stick.

Users can move the interactive piece of the slide deck to mark off tactile sensory aspects of the colorful item they found.

Finally, there is a color writing activity where users can write a sentence about the object, using the describing words that they selected. This part of the slide deck may be a higher level for some users, but the writing piece invites users to incorporate aspects of language and creative writing into the I Spy Colors activity.

Use this I Spy color activity to teach colors and work on various child development skills, including handwriting.

I Spy Colors for all ages

The slide deck is designed so it meets various levels and can be graded to different ages:

Younger kids can just look for the objects in a color scavenger hunt.
Teach colors, making it a preschool color activity that is perfect for virtual learning.
Some children can skip the tactile sensory aspect and just seek out items in the I Spy portion of the activity.
Grade the activity up by discussing tactile features.
Further grade the activity up by incorporating handwriting. Younger students can just write the word.
Older students can write the word in a sentence, working on adding describing words.
Kids that complete the handwriting portion of the slide deck activity can self-assess their handwriting, using the interactive check marks as they look over their written work.

There’s somethign for everyone with this I Spy Colors therapy activity!

Want to play I Spy Colors?

Grab the free Google slide deck by entering your email into the form below. You will receive a PDF containing a link to open the slide deck. Be sure you are logged into your Google account before clicking the button on that PDF. Save the PDF in your therapy files so you can access this resource any time and share with those on your caseload.

More color activities

Add this slide deck to these hands-on color activities:

Benefits of coloring– Use a couple of crayons to work on many areas of child development.

Visual Motor Color Match Activity– This activity translates wonderfully to virtual therapy sessions. It can be used in face-to-face interventions as well, or as a home activity.

Colored Pencils Handwriting Activities– All you need is a set of colored pencils for working on many skill areas.

Color Mixing Rainbow Write– Work on letter formation and size with this rainbow write activity that challenges kids to mix colors and see what the result is.

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Rainbow Breathing

Rainbow Breathing Activity

Rainbow meditation

Free Rainbow Breathing Printable

Rainbow Breathing

Color Exercises

Color exercises

Gross Motor Color Exercises

Fine Motor Color Exercises

Visual Motor Exercise with Colors

Virtual Color Exercise Activities

Color Exercises!

I Spy Colors Activity

I Spy Colors

Virtual I Spy

I Spy Colors for all ages

Want to play I Spy Colors?

FREE Color I Spy Activity!

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