Day: April 12, 2021

Butterfly Life Cycle Crafts Activities

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butterfly life cycle crafts and activities

Butterflies are on our brain right now.  We’re patiently waiting for the postman to drop off our batch of caterpillars that will be a part of our family for a little while as we watch their development through the butterfly life cycle.  Add these butterfly life cycle crafts and activities to your Spring occupational therapy activity themes and help kids develop the fine motor skills needed for function.

Butterfly life cycle crafts and activities for therapy sessions

The kids received a (and this is an affiliate link…) Live Butterfly Garden as a Christmas gift this year and we are SO excited to watch the butterfly life cycle.  We can’t wait to watch our new family members grow and develop and do a few butterfly life cycle activities as well!  (I can’t get over the cuteness of that Lego butterfly life cycle below!)

Butterfly Life Cycle Crafts

These crafts and activities are great to add to a life cycle of a butterfly lesson plan or to use in therapy planning in the clinic, classroom, or home. 

This butterfly cupcake liner craft is a fun way to work on scissor skills and direction following, as well as fine motor work.

Or, make a butterfly from a coffee filter and build hand strength and bilateral coordination skills.

Create a caterpillar craft using an egg carton and build hand strength and fine motor development.

This wooly bear caterpillar craft and handwriting activity helps kids with scissor skills, bilateral coordination, and includes a handwriting component.

 

Butterfly Life Cycle Activities

If you want to start with caterpillar and then move to butterfly activities, use this free bug and caterpillar slide deck to work on fine motor strength and development. The play dough and other fine motor tasks build hand strength in kids.

Recently, we released a new therapy slide deck to use in virtual therapy sessions that explores the butterfly life cycle. The butterfly therapy slide deck encourages gross motor skills, motor planning, and heavy work movement.

These heavy work cards include a page of butterfly life cycle activities that incorporate calming heavy work activities for motor planning and proprioceptive benefits.

This butterfly handwriting activity slide deck is another virtual therapy tool for using in teletherapy or even face to face sessions while working on letter formation and handwriting skills.

In the Spring Fine Motor Kit, you’ll find butterfly and caterpillar activities that are designed to build a variety of fine  motor manipulation, dexterity, and strengthening tasks.

 

 
Creative butterfly life cycle crafts and activities for kids

 

More Butterfly Life Cycle Crafts and Activities

 

Try these crafts that combine the full butterfly life cycle into crafts and activities: 

 

 

Spring Fine Motor Kit

Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!

Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:

Spring fine motor kit set of printable fine motor skills worksheets for kids.
  • Lacing cards
  • Sensory bin cards
  • Hole punch activities
  • Pencil control worksheets
  • Play dough mats
  • Write the Room cards
  • Modified paper
  • Sticker activities
  • MUCH MORE

Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.

Spring Fine Motor Kit
Spring Fine Motor Kit: TONS of resources and tools to build stronger hands.

Grab your copy of the Spring Fine Motor Kit and build coordination, strength, and endurance in fun and creative activities. Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.

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.

Earth Day Activities

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Earth Day activities

These Earth Day Activities are great for occupational therapy activities because they are full of fine motor work, bilateral coordination, motor planning, and sensory experiences. Plus, when kids create these Earth day crafts and play experiences, they are learning about recycling, cleaning up the Earth, and nature.

Earth day activities for occupational therapy

Earth Day Activities

Let’s get to the Earth Day fun!

  1. Make a recycled materials craft bin. Kids can gather recyclable materials from food containers, cardboard, artwork, and use them to make a DIY craft bin that is used for making more crafts and using in fine motor or sensory play activities. I love that the wax paper sleeves or egg cartons can be easily stored in cut cereal boxes. What a way to work on scissor skills with a variety of materials.

Here are more crafts and activities using recycled materials.

2. Use recycled materials to make a flower craft– Then, after that recycled materials craft bin is sorted, use the items to make a flower craft. Things like used egg cartons, cereal boxes, paper bags, can be cut and manipulated to craft and work on fine motor skills.

3. Head outside. There are so many benefits to playing and exploring the outdoors. And, kids can learn about the earth, too.

4. Read about recycling. These books about recycling are great to incorporate into therapy activities.

5. Incorporate recycled materials into learning concepts. Use these strategies to integrate therapy goals into the classroom with a recycling theme. You’ll find math, reading, science, and more ideas here.

This series on 31 days of learning using free materials will get you started on lots of ways to use recycled materials in classroom concepts.

6. Plant something- Explore this post on sensory gardens to find ways to incorporate sensory input in the outdoors.

 

I was surfing around on some other lovely blogs and trying to find some fun crafts that we could try.  Here are a few of our favorite ones we came across all geared towards children ages two through five.

 
 
 

 

Itsy Bitsy Learners
This is a fun activity for preschoolers using homemade textured paint.
 

 

Repeat Crafter Me
This Earth Day inspired felt counting book is such a great idea for toddlers.
 
 

 

Imprints From Tricia
What a fun idea- go on a nature hunt and create a Nature Book. Press plants, leaves, and flowers into paint and then write to describe the prints. It’s a great sensory based handwriting activity.
 
 
 
Laugh Paint Create 
Created some great recycled artwork with cardboard food boxes. Work on scissor skills, bilateral coordination, and more.

 

 

Teach Beside Me These adorable Rock faces will make anyone smile and make a beautiful addition to a garden.

 

 
All of these great posts have inspired us to go create something special out of recycled items or something Mother Earth has provided for us…we can’t wait to get our hands dirty!

 

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.