There might just be a turn in the weather! Spring therapy takes on a whole new meaning with these Spring occupational therapy activities! With a new season comes a new set of OT activities for the school-based occupational therapist or the OT working in early intervention or an outpatient clinic. I’m excited to share an update to our Spring Occupational Therapy packet that now has a TON of therapy tools and Spring activities to develop various skills like fine motor, gross motor, visual perceptual, handwriting, sensory tolerance and play, and more.
Looking for fun ways to add a creative spin to therapy sessions this time of year? You’re in luck! This week on The OT Toolbox, you’ll find loads of Spring activities. Each day, we’re rounding up activities, ideas, strategies, and tips that all have a Spring theme in common. Use these activities in your therapy plans to meet the specific needs of kiddos.
Here’s what you can find when it comes to Spring Occupational Therapy activities here on The OT Toolbox:
Spring Fine Motor Activities– Spring crafts, spring fine motor precision activities, sorting insects, mixing colors, and beading rainbows! These Spring fine motor activities develop hand strength, coordination, pincer grasp, and a functional pencil grasp!
Spring Gross Motor Activities– Work on balance, coordination, core strength, and motor planning skills with these gross motor activities for Spring. Kids will love the therapy slide decks that challenge skills (great for pediatric physical therapy, too!)
You’ll love the Spring balance beams, sequencing activities, and more (with shoulder stability, balance, coordination, and core strengthening activities at the focus!)
Spring Sensory Activities– these Spring sensory play ideas include sensory bins and heavy work activities that are great for sensory diets. While you’re at it, be sure to grab these Spring OT tools:
Outdoor Sensory Diets– so much information about supporting sensory needs through being outdoors.
Sensory Garden– Create a sensory garden on a large scale or small scale to support sensory needs through gardening this Spring.
Spring Visual Perception Activities– Use these Spring OT ideas to support visual perceptual skills like visual discrimination, visual closure, form constancy, figure ground, and other visual motor skills with a Spring theme.
Spring Handwriting Activities– School based OTs will love these handwriting occupational therapy ideas to support legibility, functional pencil grasp, writing on lines, and letter formation.
So, be sure to check out each link above to load up on creative ways to promote healthy development of kids!
There’s more… This time of year, one of our more popular products here on The OT Toolbox is our Spring Fine Motor 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.
Flower crafts are a great occupational therapy tool to develop fine motor skills, visual motor skills, executive functioning skills, and other child development areas. Here, you’ll find creative ways to support skills through craft ideas. Add these ideas to your Spring occupational therapy activities or your Spring crafts.
Flower Crafts for Occupational Therapy
I love these flower crafts to help develop fine motor skills. By tearing paper, cutting different textures, and using glue bottles children develop hand strength, coordination, and dexterity.
Spring is in the air. And depending on where you live, lots of heat or lots of rain! Let’s celebrate the beginning of May with flowers. These are our favorite flower crafts that we have done, and you may have missed. We’ve added some of our favorite flower crafts for kids from around the web, too. Click around and check out a few new blogs and find lots of flowery fun for the kids!
Start with some of these flower crafts to support the development of scissor skills, eye-hand coordination, and precision:
Foam Flower Craft– Use materials from the dollar store to work on eye-hand coordination and finger isolation.
Cupcake Liner Sunflower Craft– Work on precision, pincer grasp, in hand manipulation, and separation of the sides of the hand with this sunflower craft.
Gift Bow Stamp Art- Use a gift bow to make fun flowers. This is a great heavy work and process art activity for sensory input and eye-hand coordination skills.
Paper Clip Flowers and Play Dough– This fine motor strengthening activity uses flowers made from paper clips for a great hand strengthening activity.
Pipe Cleaner Flower– This flower craft is a great fine motor activity for kids, but also works as a DIY zipper pull to help children become more functional with self care.
Kids will also love making these flower snacks, too, for a full flower theme in therapy or at home!
Flower crafts for kids
Cherry Blossom craft– This flower craft uses clothes pins and crumbled tissue paper. It’s a great fine motor activity for developing hand strength.
Feather flower craft-This flower craft supports the development of sensory challenges. Include various textures and sticky fingers by gluing feathers and painting.
Magazine roses– Use recycled magazines and straws to make these magazine roses. When kids roll the magazine paper, they are building bilateral coordination skills, and hand strength.
Nature Hunt Flower craft- This tulip craft uses real flowers plus crafting materials but offers children a chance to get outside for much-needed sensory and calming input in nature.
Mother’s Day Flower crafts– You’ll find more flower crafts in this Mother’s Day craft list. Plus, use the ideas in this post in your own Mother’s Day crafting!
This flower craft uses items from the recycle bin. Add it to some other recycled crafts for Earth Day fun while building skills.
What is your favorite flower? Have you made a craft with that flower?
A few more Flower Crafts and Activities
More flower themed crafts and activities can be found in our Spring Fine Motor Kit! Designed to build fine motor strength, dexterity, endurance, and manipulation of tools like crayons, markers, glue bottles, and scissors, the Spring Fine Motor Kit has you covered with flower tissue paper crafts, flower push pin activities, and writing flower names to develop handwriting skills.
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.
Having a few recycle activities up your sleeve is great as a busy OT, teacher, or parent…The thing is you can always find a way to use recycled items in crafts or play that supports the development of fine motor skills! Using recycled materials in occupational therapy crafts is a great way to create while using items that are in the home.
Some of the therapy ideas here include projects made from recycled materials, and others are activities that use recycled items in actual therapy tools. Still others are recycling activities for kids.
These recycle activities for kids are crafts that can be used in occupational therapy sessions to work on fine motor skills, direction following, motor planning, eye-hand coordination, and other OT goal areas. Many of the ideas below are activities using recycled materials you probably have in your recycling bin right now. Start saving those egg cartons, plastic containers, used water bottles, newspapers, and paper, because these crafts and activity ideas build skills!
Be sure to check out the list of recycled materials for art projects and fine motor activities, too. You can pass this list on to parents so they hold onto items like paper towel tubes to be used in OT home programs or teletherapy sessions.
There are so many ways to use recycled materials in occupational therapy activities. When you think about the task of recycling, this is a very occupation-centered daily task.
activities using recycled materials
In OT, we address the functional tasks that one participates in throughout the day. Cooking, hygiene, and home management are those types of tasks. And, when participating in those daily tasks as an independent and functional being, there is trash that results as a result. That’s where activities using recycled materials comes into play.
When part of that task completion is the clean-up, or home management portion, you can insert activities using recycled materials, while recycling. So, managing recyclable refuse is part of that task completion. You can get your therapy clients involved in these recycling activities for kids while coaching towards goal areas.
In occupational therapy, we can cover the management of recycling.
There are many OT areas that can be addressed in therapy sessions (for all ages):
Sorting recycling
Identifying recyclable items
Cleaning out recyclable materials
Creating a recycle center in the home
Taking out recyclables along with the trash
Hand washing
And, part of that task process can be using recycled materials in therapy activities to address other goal areas, such as fine motor skills, strength, coordination, and balance.
Consider the possibilities of using recycle items in crafting and play!
Save this page, because you have a collection of activities in your toolbox using everyday items that are heading to the trash!
Check out the past posts listed below to find tons of creative and fun ways to learn and play with recycled materials and a few projects made from recycled materials:
projects made from recycled materials
In therapy or in learning activities, crafts are a great way to build specific skills like scissor skills, crossing midline, eye-hand coordination, motor planning, executive functioning, bilateral coordination, and other skills. Here is our giant collection of craft ideas for kids that can be used in OT sessions.
Below, you will find craft ideas using recycled items. Below, I’ve broken down OT activities by the recycled materials.
Use the ideas listed here as recycling activities for toddlers, preschoolers, and older ages, too.
Some of these ideas are great for a physical education lesson using recyclable materials, and even balance, coordination and motor planning skills needed in physical therapy sessions.
One way that I love to use these activities is to create a handwriting portion. You can ask the clients to list out materials used and then add a piece on “how did i use recycled materials in this activity?” It’s a great way to include functional handwriting.
You’ll find a section for OT activities using egg cartons, ideas using recycled containers, OT ideas with paper towel tubes, etc. Each material has so many ways to build common goal areas. Let’s get started…
Egg carton crafts and activities for kids:
Save those egg cartons! Whether you are building hand strength, working on eye-hand coordination, or building motor planning skills, recycled egg cartons can be a powerful tool to add to your therapy toolbox. Try some of these ideas in OT sessions or in the classroom or home to build skills.
Work on intrinsic hand strength with an egg carton– We used pieces of straws to build hand strength, but you can use other small items like toothpicks, beads, small toys, or even rolled pieces of paper.
Speaking of hand strength, this robin craft and fine motor activity uses an egg carton and pipe cleaners to build strength and endurance in the hand with a focus on precision and an extended wrist.
Work on buttoning with kids? Teach buttoning with an out-of-the-box activity using a recycled egg carton.
Take shoe tying to another level by teaching kids to tie shoes with an egg carton. Tying shoes can sometimes be difficult when switching to different shoes. Try practicing shoe tying on a different medium for something fun, while still working on skills such as bilateral coordination, motor planning, pinch, and sustained grasp.
Egg carton fine motor color sorting– We painted the egg carton and used colored jingle bells to work on in-hand manipulation, grasp, precision, and eye-hand coordination, but you could use any small item, and painting is totally optional.
More egg carton activities include:
Cut the sections and stack them in a tower
Clip clothes pins to the edges
Write a number or letter inside the carton. Place the correct number of small items in each section.
Sort letters written on pieces of paper
Cut the egg tray so it contains 2 rows of 5 sections. Use it as a hands-on 10 frame for teaching kindergarten math skills.
Egg Carton Crafts
Use an empty egg carton to build skills with a craft material that you might already have in your home right now. From egg carton flowers to fine motor power tools, these are recycled egg carton crafts that are therapist-approved.
Flower feather craft~ fine motor skills, direction following, multi-step feather art
Egg carton caterpillar craft- This classic recycled egg carton craft is a fun one for kids. We used it to build math skills, too.
Painted rainbow recycled egg cartons– Paint egg cartons and then use them in other crafts or sorting activities. Painting the sections of the egg carton tray requires precision and coordination.
Egg carton pumpkins– This is an OLD post here on the website, but one that is such fun. Kids can use golf tees to hammer into the sections of the egg carton, making pumpkin stems while building coordination and motor skills.
Fine motor egg carton Christmas tree~ Work on building tripod grasp to thread a Christmas tree from egg cartons. You could also just stack the recycled egg carton sections into a tower if you want to build this activity year-round.
Toilet Paper tube crafts and activities for kids:
Cardboard tube crafts using recycled paper towel tubes or toilet paper rolls are a great way to use what you’ve got while building fine motor skills. These toilet paper tube crafts have got you covered. You can also use paper towel tubes for many of these recycled materials activities and crafts. The paper tube provides a great material for young children to practice cutting, while positioning their scissors correctly and promoting bilateral coordination. When cutting a cardboard tube, kids have to start at their midline and work away from their body while holding onto the tube. It’s a great starter project for children.
Clip paper clips to the edges
Stack them up and knock them over by rolling a ball to work on coordination
Drop small items through the tubes into a target bin or basket
Use a hole punch to punch holes in the sides. Thread pipe cleaners through the holes
Slit the edges and create a building toy
Practice scissor skills by cutting down the edge
Clip clothes pins to the edges
Toilet paper rolls and paper towel tubes make a great item to use in OT sessions. Here are ways to use paper tubes visual tracking exercises with kids.
Rainbow recycled cardboard tube craft~ Color the sides of the toilet paper tube with crayons, paints, or markers and build fine motor skills, imagination, pretend play, language skills
Cardboard tube zebra craft– Cut a toilet paper tube into an animal shape and turn it into a zebra craft.
Recycled cardboard tube turkey juice box cover~ Use a paper towel tube to make a juice box cover. we made ours into a turkey, but you could create any animal. This craft builds tripod grasp, multi-step craft
Cardboard tube apple stamps~ Use a toilet paper tube to paint apples in a coordination craft. What other round objects could you paint by using a paper roll?
Recycled Plastic container activities for kids:
Use recycled bottles in fine motor activities– Plastic bottles like shampoo bottles, soap bottles, and other squeezable bottles are great for building gross hand grasp.
In-hand manipulation activities ~uses a grated cheese container and a recycled two liter drink container to develop in-hand manipulation and translation skills.
Play dough cupcakes ~using a recycled cupcake container with strengthening and fine motor development.
Mess-free bubble wrap painting~ Build fine motor skills such as tripod grasp, tip-to-tip grasp, and index finger isolation work while engaging in creative painting.
Recycled Shredded paper crafts and activities for kids:
Sight word sensory bin with shredded paper~ Use recycled paper from the paper shredder in tactile sensory play while learning and identifying sight words, visual scanning activity
Shredded paper snowy farm sensory bin~ Build language, creative expression, and imagination through pretend play with a sensory bin using recycled paper as a sensory bin base.
Bottlecap Spinning Tops- These fine motor power tools are great for precision, dexterity, grasp, in-hand manipulation, and arch development of the hands
Use bottle caps in visual tracking– Recycled materials can be used with big visual processing benefits to address visual scanning and tracking.
Working wiht children on an Occupational tehrapy home program or in OT teletherapy sessions? You can ask parents to hold on to some of these recyceld materials to use in OT sessions or to work on specific recommended activities;
Any of these recycled crafts make a great Earth Day craft…why? Kids are using recycled materials in crafting and they are learning to use what they have on hand!
For more seasonal crafts to use in OT sessions, you’ll love our Spring Crafts library!
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.
Here, you will find rainbow activities that are powerful and effective activities to help with child development. I’ve strived to pull together rainbow sensory activities, crafts, fine motor activities, visual motor activities, and movement ideas. Scroll through the various rainbow theme ideas to promote skills for all ages. These are great additions to your Spring occupational therapy activities!
Each rainbow therapy activity below is designed to promote multiple aspects of child development. These are powerful motor activities for developing areas that help kids with functional tasks, coordination, movement, and learning.
Rainbow Fine Motor Activities
A rainbow therapy theme is great during the Spring months.
This time of year, rainbows are the way to go for building fine motor skills. Try some of these activities to work on fine motor strength, coordination, hand eye coordination, motor planning. You’ll see improvements in pencil control, dexterity, precision, in-hand manipulation, and fine motor skill work.
Rainbow pencil control activities– All you need is some colored pencils and paper to work on pencil control, visual motor skills, and hand strengthening.
Rainbow Color Mixing Handwriting Activity– Grab a pack of markers. Kids can work on color mixing and letter formation, letter size, spacing, and handwriting legibility.
Rainbow bead bracelets– Use beads and pipe cleaners to make a set of rainbow beads and develop pincer grip, in-hand manipulation skills, bilateral coordination, open thumb web space, arch development, and eye-hand coordination skills.
Rainbow PreWriting Lines Activity– This free therapy slide deck is a fine motor and gross motor activity to help kids with pre-writing skills. Kids can work on finger isolation, eye-hand coordination, visual motor skills, and more.
Pot of Gold Coins– Cover cardboard circles or washers with foil to make gold coins. If you can grab some gold wrapping paper or tissue paper, use it to wrap the circles while kids develop bilateral coordination, precision, hand strength, and motor skills.
In this blog post, you’ll also see how to tie scraps of fabric to create a rainbow. This is a fun bilateral coordination activity that builds hand eye coordination skills as well.
Rainbow Bottle Activity– All you need is an empty water bottle and colorful craft pom poms to work on finger isolation, in-hand manipulation, bilateral coordination, hand eye coordination, and dexterity. This is a great rainbow activity for preschoolers or toddlers.
Rainbow Fine Motor Sort– All you need is an ice tray and colorful craft pom poms to work on in-hand manipulation skills, sorting, precision, dexterity, and finger isolation.
Rainbow Scoop and Sort– A simple rainbow sensory bin can include beads, yarn, or any colorful materials and a handful of cotton balls. Add a kitchen utensil or scoops, tongs, or other tools to scoop, manipulate, and work on coordination, and fine motor skill development.
Rainbow Fine Motor Work on the Window– Kids can cut foam sheets into strips to work on scissor skills. Then, stick these to a window or even a shower wall to work on precision, wrist extension, wrist stability, shoulder strength and stability, core strength, and the coordination skills needed for fine motor tasks like pencil control and dexterity.
Rainbow Cups– Make a set of these colorful cups and work on bilateral coordination, eye-hand coordination, core strength, motor planning, and more.
Rainbow Flip and Fill Fine Motor Activity– Kids can use these alphabet worksheets to fill the upper case or lowercase letters and develop fine motor skills like in-hand manipulation, eye-hand coordination, precision, open thumb web space, and more, with these color activities in the Colors Handwriting pack and bonus pages.
Rainbow Visual Motor Activities
Rainbow Ladder– Use this rainbow visual motor activity to work on visual scanning, visual tracking, visual figure ground, form constancy, visual discrimination, and other visual motor skills needed for handwriting and reading. We used this in a cursive handwriting activity, but you could use the same concept in teaching upper and lowercase letter identification, number writing, sight words, or other multi-sensory learning strategies.
Rainbow Drawing Visual Motor Activities– Use this occupational therapy teletherapy slide deck to encourage kids to copy rainbow drawing forms and build pencil control, visual perceptual skills with simple and complex drawing skills.
Emotion Matching Game– Use this rainbow matching game to teach emotions and social emotional developmental milestones and skills. It’s a powerful way to work on visual perceptual skills too, including visual scanning, eye-hand coordination, visual discrimination, and other visual motor skills.
Rainbow Colors Pre-writing Lines Mazes– These mazes are great for developing pencil control, eye-hand coordination skills, fine motor dexterity, and visual motor skills.
Rainbow Sensory Play
When kids participate in sensory play experiences, they develop tactile sensory exposure and can explore tactile experiences. Use these activities to learn colors, and learn through play! Try these multisensory learning activities to teach colors, and develop sensory exploration through play.
Rainbow Deep Breathing Exercise– Use this rainbow deep breathing exercise as a calming self regulation activity to help with coping strategies and mindfulness.
Rainbow Sensory Bottle– In this rainbow sensory bottle, we used friendship thread to incorporate all the colors of the rainbow, but making a calming sensory bottle can use any materials you have on hand. Use the sensory bottle as a calming sensory tool.
Rainbow Playdough– When kids play with play dough, they gain proprioceptive input through their hands and fingers. This heavy work input is a powerful resistive activity that “wakes up” the hands but also can be calming.
Rainbow Sensory Bins– Making rainbow sensory bins are easy but there are big benefits. Kids can use sensory bins as a tactile sensory experience, but with fine motor benefits like tool use, scooping sorting, fine motor precision, dexterity, manipulation skills, coordination, and so much more. Add sight words and high-frequency words, or math manipulatives to use these rainbow sensory bins in multi-sensory learning opportunities.
Rainbow Xylophone– Kids can explore sound, STEAM concepts, and motor skills in this auditory processing activity.
Rainbow Crafts to develop skills
These rainbow crafts are powerful ways to work on fine motor skills, manipulation of tools, dexterity, strength, motor planning skills, handwriting, and more.
Rainbow binoculars craft– Kids can make this rainbow binoculars craft and work on scissor skills, bilateral coordination motor planning, and precision. Then, use this rainbow craft to encourage visual scanning, visual perceptual skills, and more. Can you use this in a color scavenger hunt?
Egg carton rainbows– Use a recycled egg carton and kids can paint in this process art activity that develops grasp, precision, eye-hand coordination, and sensory experiences.
Rainbow Snacks
When children are active in the kitchen, they develop so many fine motor skills, executive functioning skills. The kitchen is a prime location for developing working memory, attention, direction following, as well as offering learning opportunities, as well. Fine motor skills in the kitchen are just some of the benefits of cooking with kids!
Try these rainbow recipes that kids can make and are a perfect addition to a rainbow theme.
Rainbow Snacks– These rainbow snack cups are perfect snacks for preschool. When kids help to make them, they can work on cutting foods, sorting, visual scanning, and fine motor skills, too!
Color Snack– Pair kitchen activities with a popular children’s book to explore colors and developing skills in the kitchen with kids.
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.
For more rainbow crafts and ideas to support development of skills, check out the Spring themed activities in our Spring Crafts library. There are fun ways to use a paper plate to create a rainbow while working on scissor skills…and just so many other Spring tools for supporting the development of kids of all ages.
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.
