St. Patrick’s Day Writing Slide Deck

St. Patrick's Day writing prompts and activities

Another free therapy slide deck in this week’s St. Patty’s Day theme is this St. Patrick’s Day writing activity. It’s an occupational therapy activity that addresses handwriting, legibility, self-correction in writing, and fine motor skills. Sometimes it can be hard to work on handwriting in teletherapy and this activity strives to make that fun and motivating for kids. Use the St. Patrick’s Day writing prompts as activities to get kids started on letter formation, sizing, spacing, and the motor skills needed to hold the pencil with a fun March theme.

This slide deck goes really well with our recent freebies: Four Leaf Clover balance exercises and Shamrock Theme Visual Perception Activities.

All are part of the free slides teletherapy resources here on The OT Toolbox.

St. Patrick's Day writing prompts and activities

St. Patrick’s Day Writing

Working on handwriting isn’t fun for a lot of children. That’s why the slide deck starts off with a writing “ice breaker” activity of sorts. Kids can check out the St. Patrick’s Day items on the slide and try to memorize the items. Then, you can move to the next slide and ask the child to tell you two items that are missing.

This visual constancy exercise is a way to help kids notice details about what they see, and can be a powerful way to work on handwriting accuracy and formation of letters. Use this as a building block to work on self-correcting handwriting mistakes.

When children write, that self-assessment piece is important to legibility and accuracy of writing, so when kids can notice and recall missing information or details, they can self-correct for legibility issues.

As kids go through the slides, ask them to write down the items that are missing. This handwriting activity challenges kids to write without a model, so they are building letter formation skills.

Then, the next slide shows the answer to the missing pieces. Kids can check their letter formation for accuracy and correct letter formation.

St. Patrick's day writing prompt and puzzle

There are two different exercises like this one.

Depending on the child, you can then have them write down all of the St. Patrick’s Day items.

Next, users are asked to write the St. Patrick’s Day words in alphabetical order. This activity challenges visual shift from the vertical plane to the horizontal plane and back again. This skillset is needed for copying material from a blackboard or classroom environment. Putting words into alphabetical order also challenges the visual attention and visual memory needed for reading and math work.

The next several slides of the therapy deck include a fine motor piece where kids are challenged to spell St. Patrick’s Day words in American Sign Language. They will need to visually shift their attention from the word to the sign language sign and form that letter.

Spelling several words with sign language is a fine motor exercise that helps with finger dexterity, precision, finger isolation, arch development, and motor planning skills.

St. Patrick’s Day Writing Prompts

Then, the final piece of the St. Patrick’s Day writing task is to use the words that have been used throughout the slide deck to write sentences. It’s an open-ended St. Patrick’s Day writing prompt that incorporates multisensory learning into the whole lesson.

Encourage kids to self-check their writing for accuracy and to help with carryover of writing skills.

Free Writing and Fine Motor Slide Deck

Add this therapy slide deck to your toolbox. Enter your email into the form below and you will get a copy to use in teletherapy, home programs, or in the classroom.

St. Patrick’s Day Writing and Fine Motor Activity

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    Colors Handwriting Kit

    Rainbow Handwriting Kit– This resource pack includes handwriting sheets, write the room cards, color worksheets, visual motor activities, and so much more. The handwriting kit includes:

    • Write the Room, Color Names: Lowercase Letters
    • Write the Room, Color Names: Uppercase Letters
    • Write the Room, Color Names: Cursive Writing
    • Copy/Draw/Color/Cut Color Worksheets
    • Colors Roll & Write Page
    • Color Names Letter Size Puzzle Pages
    • Flip and Fill A-Z Letter Pages
    • Colors Pre-Writing Lines Pencil Control Mazes
    • This handwriting kit now includes a bonus pack of pencil control worksheets, 1-10 fine motor clip cards, visual discrimination maze for directionality, handwriting sheets, and working memory/direction following sheet! Valued at $5, this bonus kit triples the goal areas you can work on in each therapy session or home program.

    Click here to get your copy of the Colors Handwriting Kit.

    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.

    Shamrock Theme Visual Perception Slide Deck

    Shamrock theme visual perception

    This week’s free therapy slide decks are all about the shamrock theme! This visual perception slide deck covers all things shamrocks and is a fun way to help kids work on skills such as visual discrimination, figure ground, form constancy, visual memory, and visual spatial skills. So, grab this free slide deck and let’s get started!

    You’ll want to add the other shamrock themed activities to your therapy toolbox, too: Four leaf clover exercises and St. Patrick’s Day writing activities are sure to round out all of your therapy needs this time of year.

    Shamrock theme visual perception activities for vision therapy or OT teletherapy activities.

    These teletherapy activities are included in our massive collection of free slides, which is growing each week. Be sure to head over there to see the other therapy slide decks you’ve missed.

    Shamrock Theme

    This time of year, it’s fun to incorporate a shamrock theme into therapy and play. So, when I was thinking of therapy goal areas to address in this week’s slide decks, I knew visual perceptual skills was one of the essential areas.

    Visual perceptual skills are important to handwriting, hands-on play, math, reading, learning, and functioning. By visually scanning for differences in details, and being able to pull out visual discriminatory differences, children are building the skills they need for identifying words when reading…noticing different numbers in math problems, recognizing visual information they’ve read or seen before. All of this is connected to learning and functional participation in daily tasks. Read here on visual motor skills to see how all of these parts work together.

    So, the shamrock theme visual perception activities take what we know about visual processing, and make fun vision therapy exercises to work on these very skills.

    In the shamrock activities, you’ll find several different, but all equally effective vision activities…kind of like vision puzzles!

    Find the shamrock

    On the first several slides of the therapy activities, you’ll see that users are challenged to count and identify matching shamrocks. These visual discrimination skills are powerful ways to work on form constancy, visual scanning, visual memory, and visual attention. When kids foster these skills, they work on the areas needed for reading and keeping their place in a reading passage. It’s a skill needed for reading fluency and comprehension.

    Shamrock visual perception exercise

    Users can count the number of each shamrock on the board and type that number into the slide deck. Students who are working on handwriting can write the number on paper.

    There are two different slides that work on these slills.

    You’ll also see a vision exercise where students can click and drag a circle to cover the shamrock that has been flipped. All of the other clovers in the row have been rotated. This form constancy skill is needed when reading so children know that letters are the same, not matter how they are written in different sizes or fonts.

    Shamrock activity to work on working memory, spatial relations, and directionality

    There is another activity that might be my favorite. This one foster directionality and spatial awareness. Kids can identify the colors of shamrocks that are above, next to, or between others. This activity works on working memory and position in space skills. Teaching spatial relations with direction terms is an important way to help children with spatial awareness in handwriting, body awareness, and laterality.

    Other vision activities in the slide deck include a seek-and-find exercise that asks kids to find the four leaf clover hidden in a patch of shamrocks. This activity works on visual scanning, visual figure-ground skills, and visual attention. All of these skills are needed for a child to locate items in a busy background.

    Shamrock vision therapy exercise for visual discrimination

    There is a shadow matching activity that challenge kids to foster their visual discrimination and visual memory skills.

    Shamrock theme visual perception activity for visual scanning

    Finally, there is a visual scanning and visual memory activity where kids can scan the shamrocks to find pairs that are the same, within a group. this is a powerful exercise to build skills needed for reading words and letters in a sentence or passage, and can build the skills needed for reading comprehension and fluency.

    Free Shamrock Therapy Slide Deck

    Want to add this shamrock theme activities to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below and you can get a copy for yourself.

    Note: this free slide deck is interactive, so there are movable parts on the Google slides. You’ll need to use the slides in edit mode, as the parts won’t be moveable in present mode.

    Be sure to make a copy and NOT share the original slides. Other users will be moving the pieces, too so if you don’t make your own copy, you will have pieces that are not in the correct spaces.

    Finally, once you go through the slides and move items around, you can easily rest the slides to their original state and start over with another child on your caseload. Simply go to “history” and hit “reset slides” to get the movable pieces back.

    Shamrock Theme Visual Perception Exercises!

      We respect your privacy. Unsubscribe at anytime.
      Colors Handwriting Kit

      Rainbow Handwriting Kit– This resource pack includes handwriting sheets, write the room cards, color worksheets, visual motor activities, and so much more. The handwriting kit includes:

      • Write the Room, Color Names: Lowercase Letters
      • Write the Room, Color Names: Uppercase Letters
      • Write the Room, Color Names: Cursive Writing
      • Copy/Draw/Color/Cut Color Worksheets
      • Colors Roll & Write Page
      • Color Names Letter Size Puzzle Pages
      • Flip and Fill A-Z Letter Pages
      • Colors Pre-Writing Lines Pencil Control Mazes
      • This handwriting kit now includes a bonus pack of pencil control worksheets, 1-10 fine motor clip cards, visual discrimination maze for directionality, handwriting sheets, and working memory/direction following sheet! Valued at $5, this bonus kit triples the goal areas you can work on in each therapy session or home program.

      Click here to get your copy of the Colors Handwriting Kit.

      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.