Colleen Beck OTR/L

It’s cold weather season and mittens are a part of the necessary wardrobe item this time of year. However, using mitten activities as a Christmas occupational therapy or Winter OT theme for developing skills is fun this time of season too. Winter activities can do more than compliment the season, they can help a child build their eye-hand coordination, fine motor dexterity and manipulation as well as their visual perceptual skills. 

There’s no need to go outside with these fun mitten activity ideas, so stay warm and sneak in a little skill building too while also having fun. 

Mitten Activities and Crafts

We have rounded up an assortment of great mitten activities that address a variety of skills and a variety of ages. These are great ways to promote child development with a mitten theme, whether you are doing a mitten unit in the classroom, or need some winter activities for the therapy room or home!

We have taken the time to locate a few activities that will help many children. Browse these fun ideas and place them on your to-do list as they will help you work with children on building some important skills in therapy, in the classroom, or during at home learning. They include gross motor, fine motor, visual perception, craft ideas, a few books, and a few snack ideas to boot! 

Mitten activities to develop Gross motor skills:

Creating a gross motor activity with the mitten theme can be easily done using this tape mitten on the floor as kids can work on jumping, throwing, and a number of other movement activities involving this clever shape. How about rolling up some mittens and then tossing them into the floor mitten?  It’s endless what you could do here with this activity. 

Mitten matching is a great way to work on gross motor skills. Gather pairs of mittens or gloves and scatter them around a room. Kids can run around (or skip, hop, leap, or animal crawl) and try to match the mittens as fast as they can. What a way to develop memory skills, visual discrimination, and spatial awareness, too.

Another easy creation that incorporates the use of a scooter board can provide a combined challenge of visual memory, upper extremity strengthening, and neck extension while riding prone on the board. This mitten memory match game is played by having the child lie prone on the board and pulling themselves around the floor to locate the matching pairs of mittens which are placed all around.

One more fun gross motor activity that pictures a glove, however, a mitten could easily be substituted for the same purpose and the play is called Velcro mitten ball.  The Velcro ball is created by simply adding circular Velcro dots to the exterior of a wiffle ball and then having the children work on their eye-hand and bilateral coordination by pulling the ball from the mitten and tossing the ball at a target. 

Mitten Ideas to build Fine motor skills:

In the Winter Fine Motor Kit, you’ll find mitten themed activities designed for building fine motor skills. These include mitten lacing cards, mitten tracing activities, mitten handwriting ideas, and more. The Winter Fine Motor Kit is a printable pack loaded with activity ideas to develop fine motor skills.

Work on a functional fine motor task using real mittens. Simply gather several pairs of mittens and toss them into a big bin. Then, kids can match up the mitten pairs and use clothes pins to hang them on a rope clothesline. If you are working indoors, use a drying rack or even backing cooling rack to pin mittens together. This is a great bilateral coordination task that builds hand strength, and visual motor skills.

Mitten lacing is an activity that addresses fine motor control and pincer grasp, but also bilateral coordination and perceptual skills too. It’s an easy activity to create with the use of cardstock, foam, or even felt. An adult can hole punch around the outside edges of the mitten template or you can have the child do the hole punching – adding a hand strengthening element. 

This fun mitten beading is the perfect fine motor and bilateral coordination activity for kids to work on this winter season. By using a tripod grasp or a pincer grasp, children will build grasping skills, finger strength, and eye-hand coordination while beading and matching the colors on the mitten with an added learning component of color recognition. 

It’s a fun time with this color sorting mitten activity which combines color matching with tong use making it a great tripod grasp activity too. With colored mittens lying on the table top and matching colored pom-pom balls, kiddos use the tongs to pick up the pom-pom balls and place on top of the matching mitten color. Use paper, foam, or felt for your mitten creations.

Not exactly a mitten idea, but you can also use a child’s glove to work on finger isolation, separation of the sides of the hand, and dexterity tasks. Cut the fingers off a cheap glove and use the glove as a fine motor therapy tool .

A mitten or glove can be a weighted fidget tool too. Using a glove or mitten as a weighted tool is practical and frugal.

Mitten Activities for Visual perceptual skills:

Use mitten printables to work on skill-building. In the Winter Fine Motor Kit, you’ll find mitten handwriting activities, mitten drawing ideas, and more.

We love this mitten matching game! It can be completed with mittens being made from construction paper, foam sheets, or felt. Any of these materials will do and all you need is a clothesline, colored clothespins (or not), and some matching mittens…add-in a die and you can easily make it a game too. Works on strengthening, bilateral coordination, and shoulder stability along with color matching.  Plus, if you emphasize both mittens being clipped on being oriented the same way and it adds in some visual perceptual skills too!

This mitten matching interactive bulletin board is like the previous activity, but it has letters on the mittens and clothespins for matching. With this added learning element, it adds a fun perceptual component as well. Plus, who doesn’t like a vertical surface and the fact that it is an interactive bulletin board! 

Here’s a fun mitten pattern match visual perceptual activity where kiddos not only match the shapes and colors, but they also must orient the shapes in the same direction to match the model AND if you have the child focus on the lines, you can have them work on sitting the shapes on the lines making it more like a precursor to handwriting similarly to sitting letters on the baseline.

Ok, you have to try this fun mitten memory game!  With the use of scrapbook paper that has a pattern on one side and is plain on the other side, you can create a fun mitten memory game. This makes for a fun visual perceptual memory activity and if they orient the mittens the same way and clip them together with either a paperclip or a clothespin, voila, it adds some fine motor skill building too! Just laminate these mitten cards to use in sensory play for multisensory learning.

This alphabet match mitten activity is a quick activity that can be pulled together in a short amount of time and can easily use any alphabet items you might have such as magnetic letters, bead letters, foam letters, or even paper letters. Kiddos visually scan the letters on the mitten and place the matching letter item on top of the letter. 

Mitten Crafts

Try this fun penguin mitten craft, it’s cute and simple, plus kids love how it turns it!  This activity will give you the opportunity to work with kiddos on cutting with scissors, painting with a fork, and sequencing to complete the craft. Unique and creative is what you’ll get with this cutie!

Older kids will love this fun craft activity called friendly monster mittens that is easy to create and cheap to do as who doesn’t have at least a couple of singular mittens lying around. No mittens? Use some gloves or socks instead. Older kids will have the opportunity to use needle and thread making it a great life skill activity as they sew on buttons and pieces of felt to create their friendly monster mitten. Fun and cute! 

Mitten snacks:

This is a cute mitten toast idea that will warm-up any cold morning. It’s so easy to do, that the children will love using a simple cookie cutter to cut out their mitten toast shapes and you’ll be excited that you were able to sneak in some bilateral coordination and strengthening to the fun too! Plus, adding a little jam to this seasonal shape will give a little hands-on knife use with that spreading practice!

These cute Rice Krispy mittens will provide a sweet treat that children will devour right away and so will adults as kiddos can work on some basic cooking related skills such as ingredient gathering, measuring, stirring, and spreading. They also get to work with the cookie cutter again sneaking in even more bilateral coordination and strengthening.

Honestly, you could even try a mitten cookie cutter and create mitten-shaped grilled cheese and PB & J sandwiches. Have the child work on making the sandwiches relevant to there age and then use a simple cookie cutter and create fun mitten sandwiches! It’s an easy way to address basic cooking skills and add some hand strengthening to the activity.

Mitten Books

There are many mitten books that are a favorite children book for snuggling up and reading, but also developing skills through play.

These are great mitten books for preschoolers, or to use in a kindergarten mystery reader session. Simply add a movement component or one of the hands-on activities we’ve already covered, and you are moving toward child development with a mitten theme! (affiliate links)

• The Mitten by Jan Brett
• A fun and touching books, Mittens
• The Mitten Tree

The Mitten Teaches Sequencing Skills

Of those books, The Mitten is a powerful (and fun) way for kids to develop skills through a winter book. Use The Mitten by Jan Brett to work on sequencing, auditory memory, visual memory, recall, and ordering. It’s a great way to work on early executive functioning skills in young children. Each mitten story can easily be incorporated into all of your mitten fun this season. 

There are so many ways to incorporate books into occupational therapy, and these mitten books won’t disappoint when it comes to handwriting opportunities, movement, auditory processing with mitten story retelling activities, and sensory play.

There you go, all the mitten activities you need to get through the winter season in a fun way! The temperature outside might be causing you to say “Brrr”, but these activities can warm up your therapy, classroom, or at home activity time.

Regina Parsons-Allen is a school-based certified occupational therapy assistant. She has a pediatrics practice area of emphasis from the NBCOT. She graduated from the OTA program at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute in Hudson, North Carolina with an A.A.S degree in occupational therapy assistant. She has been practicing occupational therapy in the same school district for 20 years. She loves her children, husband, OT, working with children and teaching Sunday school. She is passionate about engaging, empowering, and enabling children to reach their maximum potential in ALL of their occupations as well assuring them that God loves them!

You’ll be able to jingle all the way this holiday season as you use this collection of jingle bell activities that bring with them skill building! Kids can develop fine motor, gross motor, visual motor, coordination, and sensory skills using jingle bell activities this time of year. Plus, the fun of jingly bells bring festive fun and even sweet-sounding instruments to boot! 

Kids just love jingle bells of any size and shape and not just in this season either! There’s always something fun and engaging when you shake a bell whether you’re simply just playing with it, making a jingle bell craft, or have a plan to use it…everyone has to shake them.

These are just some of the Christmas occupational therapy ideas we have on the site…have fun building skills with holiday bells!

Jingle Bell Activities

December means a lot of opportunities for jingle bell fun so, how about some jingle bell activities that not only sound good, but work on some of those important skills too!

That’s right, jingle bells can work on much needed skill development and practice. They can be motivating and just what you need to address fine motor, visual motor, gross motor, sensory motor, and even oral motor skills too! Yep, I said oral motor!  So, let’s combine this holiday theme with some educational and therapeutic activities to get festive and have some fun! 

Jingle Bell Activities for Visual motor skills:

Add jingle bells to a marble run to work on visual tracking skills, eye-hand coordination, visual scanning, and many other visual processing skills. This activity doubles as a fine motor workout for kids, too.

Jingle bell shapes is an activity that works not only on fine and visual motor skills for shape formation and pipe cleaner manipulation, but how about those math skills that work on counting how many sides each shape has while forming the shapes? You also get free printables at this link so you can do just that. 

Jingle bell names provides a festive visual motor and perceptual twist to some letter formation and practice of writing names. Adults write the child’s name on paper and then have the child place jingle bells on the letters just as if they were forming the letters with a writing tool. 

This jingle bell maze is a super DIY activity that has you recycling and creating with a child to work on a variety of skills when its complete.  That’s right DIY with a Styrofoam tray and pipe cleaners or straws and then add a bell.  It’s an activity that works on bilateral coordination, eye-hand coordination, grading of movement, and motor planning too! 

A simple jingle bell pencil is a great activity to provide a little auditory input while also working on handwriting or even drawing skills. What do you do? Just have the child string some bells onto a pipe cleaner and then wrap it around the top of the pencil or drawing tool and thus, you have created a musical writing implement! 

Even though the jingle bell pencil was cool, how about a jingle bell paintbrush? That’s right, the same idea with use of a paintbrush which provides some cheerful auditory input while painting. Don’t want to paint? That’s ok, consider using it in a rice tray to do some letter formation instead! Fun for therapy or even art class too!

Jingle Bell Activities to Develop Fine motor skills:

Add these fine motor jingle bell ideas to your Christmas fine motor activities line-up this time of year:

The jingle bell drop is an activity that can be done three different ways and works on the use of tongs or even just a pincer grasp. Decorate the container like a reindeer or wrap with wrapping paper and have even more fun with this activity. You can even just pull some containers out the cabinet or recycle bin, add some bells, and your all set.

Here’s a jingle bell sorting idea that uses those bells to play and learn. Recycle again by using an egg carton and some paint and away you go with sorting and learning, plus you can specifically target in-hand manipulation, scanning, and eye-hand coordination and let’s not forget color identification.

Treading jingle bells onto pipe cleaners is an easy jingle bell activity that develops fine motor skills, bilateral coordination, and eye-hand coordination skills in a big way.

This jingle bell tree is a fun game that incorporates counting as you roll the die and count the dots and the bells to know how many to place on the Styrofoam tree. I love this one as I have done it before and the kids loved it too. A great activity to work on cupping hands together to shake the die and roll. It also addresses fine motor and visual motor skills to thread the bells onto the toothpicks. This can be tricky depending on the bell. 

Use those jingle bells and cookie cutters as an invitation to play activity simply by just picking up and placing the bells inside the cookie cutters to work on pincer grasp or tong use. You can also incorporate patterning or even counting. 

Jingle Bell Activities for Building Gross motor skills:

Need a little gross motor activity to go with all of the other fun listed here? Guess what, you can create a fun jingle bell toss game out of bells, plastic cups, and a slanted surface that you could create with cardboard or a foam board to make this fun game. Children will love it and so will adults! 

If you have children or know of any that like nerf games than this activity might be for them.  You create a target such as a tree with holes in it, add some dangling jingle bells, stand it up, and you’ve got a game. If nerf is not their thing, that’s o.k., you can easily substitute with bean bags or balls.

Don’t have cardboard to create a tree? That’s o.k. too, use plastic cups and create a tree-like pyramid and decorate with jingle bell ornaments. These games are great for gross motor and eye-hand coordination skills.

This jingle bell scoop and transfer activity is so simple, but so effective in addressing an important life skill as well as some motor skills of wrist rotation, shoulder control and stability, grip strength, and eye-hand coordination.

Jingle Bell Activities to develop Oral motor skills:

You can address oral motor skills with jingle bells too. Use a straw and jingle bells on a table surface, just like we did with this cotton ball oral motor activity. Simply hold the straw in your mouth and blow through the straw to move a jingle bell across the table. This jingle bell blowing activity is a fantastic way to work on breath control, building strength in the cheek and lip musculature, and can even address self-regulation as well.

Jingle bell Activities for developing Auditory skills:

Jingle bells automatically provide some auditory input, but here are easy instruments and craft ideas for the holiday.

Make jingle bell dominos to support auditory processing, including auditory discrimination skills. The dominoes can be used in fine and gross motor activities and add an auditory component to learning and play.

Another fun listening and discrimination activity uses jingle bells and movement. We shared this activity in our Christmas party ideas post a few years back. Kids will love to jingle a holiday bell and then listen for where in the room the sound is coming from. What a great attention, auditory memory, and auditory discrimination activity.

The jingle bell sticks are fun reindeer faces made on craft sticks using pipe cleaners, googly eyes, craft sticks, and a bell. Perfect for working on fine motor, sequencing, and activity engagement. 

The fuzzy stick jingle bell craft is also another fun noisemaker that is made with only pipe cleaners and bells, that’s it. Same skills addressed here!

Jingle Bell Activities and Sensory skills:

Lastly, we have to mention sensory activities that can easily be created with the use of jingle bells. These are great occupational therapy Christmas activities to use this time of year.

One is called jingle soup which uses jingle bells in scented water and a child can work on placing, stirring, and serving the bells such as in a pretend restaurant. This can further work on those life skills of managing a spoon just like the scoop and transfer activity.

Making this jingle bell slime provides the perfect hands-on activity that addresses tactile tolerance and sequencing skills while using some important hand strength and bilateral coordination while kneading the slime by hand. Toss in those jingle bells and there’s your auditory input!

Using a paper jingle bell sensory bin and a pom-pom jingle bell sensory bin will not only provide lots of fun, but will give the opportunity for a child to work on tactile and auditory exploration.  The paper bin will provide a little extra auditory input when the child hears the crunching of the shredded paper as they dig for jingle bells and a little extra tactile input as they feel the scratchiness of the paper.  The pom-pom bin provides a little extra tactile input as they feel the softness of the pom-poms when they dig for bells.

Now take some time and provide some jingle to your therapy sessions, classroom, or at home learning activities as you work with kids on building some skills that are motivated by the core instrument sound of the season.

Regina Parsons-Allen is a school-based certified occupational therapy assistant. She has a pediatrics practice area of emphasis from the NBCOT. She graduated from the OTA program at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute in Hudson, North Carolina with an A.A.S degree in occupational therapy assistant. She has been practicing occupational therapy in the same school district for 20 years. She loves her children, husband, OT, working with children and teaching Sunday school. She is passionate about engaging, empowering, and enabling children to reach their maximum potential in ALL of their occupations as well assuring them that God loves them!