Colleen Beck OTR/L

Colleen Beck, OTR/L is a pediatric occupational therapist and the owner and author of The OT Toolbox website. She manages all of The OT Toolbox social media accounts and runs the popular newsletter. Read about Colleen's experience and career as an occupational therapist, including how The OT Toolbox began on our About The OT Toolbox page: https://www.theottoolbox.com/about-us/ Colleen created The OT Toolbox in 2011 and since then has written thousands of blog posts designed to support therapy providers, educators, parents, counselors, admin, and caregivers in promoting the healthy development of kids. Check out Colleen's blog posts below:

Tangrams and Visual Perception in Handwriting

October 20, 2024April 19, 2016 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

I kind of love to share tricks for improving handwriting. There are so many “parts” to written work. There’s fine motor dexterity, pencil grasp, strength, endurance, visual perceptual skills, cognitive skills among other parts to handwriting. You can see more about these topics on our Handwriting page. One big way to develop the skills needed in written work is to address visual perception.

Kids love to play. It’s in their soul. Play is the primary occupation of a child and so it only makes sense to work on functional skills like handwriting though play. Practicing writing over and over again sounds pretty boring to me and I can bet that any kiddo will agree. Today’s activities are designed to work on the visual perceptual skills needed for handwriting using tangrams.

Get ready to play and build your way to neater handwriting!

Work on handwriting skills using tangrams to address the visual perception skills needed for written work.

This post contains affiliate links.

Visual Perception and Tangram Activities

If you’re looking for fun ways to work on handwriting, these activities are the way to go. I’ve come up with creative puzzles, drawing activities, and building challenges that will work on all of the skills needed for improving line awareness, letter formation, and neatness in written work.

Our Melissa and Dough tangram set is used a lot in our house. It’s a great open-ended toy that doubles as a therapy tool for building skills such as eye-hand coordination.

RELATED IDEA: Try DIY Sponge Tangrams for these hands-on learning activities.

We created these file folder activities using the tangrams and came up with activities that will work on all of the areas of written work. Building skills like Position in Space and Visual Discrimination are important when it comes to improving neatness in written work.

We printed off some worksheets and attached them to a file folder with paper clips. I set out the tangram shapes and showed my kindergartner and preschooler how to copy the forms. While they built shapes, they were developing and refining skills like Eye-Hand Coordination and Sequential Memory.

We set up a few different activities using the file folder station. It’s a nice activities because all of the pages can be attached to the same file folder using the paper clips. The pages can be rotated out and more complex sheets added in. When you’re done, simply close the file folder and slip it away with the tangram box to play another day.

Visual Perceptual Skills and Handwriting

This activity workbook has information on all of the visual perceptual areas necessary for written work:

Visual Spatial Relations
Visual Discrimination
Visual Figure Ground
Form Constancy
Visual Memory
Eye-Hand Coordination
Sequential Memory
Visual Closure

It’s available in our Shop for $6.

All printable sheets in the workbook were created with design creation tools (The handdrawn examples in the images in this post are just a mock-up for a visual example of the activity.)

Looking for more ways to learn and play with Tangrams? Try these:

Pattern Matching Race from Learning 2 Walk
Pattern Block Pattern Trains from The Kindergarten Connection
Reading Games with Pattern Blocks from Books and Giggles
Tangrams and Visual Perception in Handwriting from Sugar Aunt
Pattern Block BINGO with Printable Mats from School Time Snippets
DIY Sponge Tangrams

Read about the Visual Perception, Tangrams, & Handwriting Workbook

Improve Handwriting with Art

July 11, 2019April 15, 2016 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

There are some kids out there who absolutely HATE handwriting. Let me re-phase that. There are a ton of kids who completely despise to their core the act of working neat handwriting, pencil grasp, slowing down so people can read their words, and writing on the lines. A ton. I’ve worked with many (many!) kids like this. I’ve recommended fun activities to about a zillion parents and teachers of these kiddos. It just isn’t fun and it is work for them. Poor handwriting can result from so many factors: fine motor development, motor planning, visual perceptual skills, and attention, are just a few of the areas that interfere with neatness in written work.

So how do you possibly get through to build those areas up when the child is resistant to pick up a pencil and copy written work?

You make it completely NOT handwriting practice.

I’ve got a super creative way to sneak in skills like pencil control, line awareness, spatial awareness, and letter formation. And kids won’t realize they are building their ability to write on lines, space between words, and form letters the correct size. And it all uses art!

Work on handwriting skills like line awareness, letter formation, pencil control, spatial awareness, and bilateral coordination with tangle art!

Work on Handwriting with Tangle Art

Affiliate links are present in this blog post.

I was lucky enough to snag a copy of my friend Jeanette’s new art book, Tangle Art Drawing Games for Kids: A Silly Book for Creative and Visual Thinking. This book is completely creative with easy and fun ways to get arty. I flipped through the book and loved every single project. They are no-prep art ideas that require only a pen and paper for most of the ideas. You could do every project in the book and then go back to the beginning and re-do them all and still be inspired to create new and fun art.

Seriously, the new favorrite book in our house is Tangle Art Drawing Games for Kids: A Silly Book for Creative and Visual Thinking!

One project in the book drew me in when i saw it. Ice pop stick tangle art is the perfect workout to build the skills needed for neatness in handwriting while creating fun art.

We followed the directions in the book to make shapes using craft sticks. Just tracing the craft sticks is a great way to work on bilateral coordination. When a child writes, it is essential that they hold the paper with their non-dominant hand. Then need to stabilize the paper in order for the pencil to glide across the page.

Just try writing without holding the pencil and you will notice a difference in neatness. This small task is often one that slides when kids loose attention in a handwriting task. You might see them slouch over at their desk and write without holding the paper.

Tracing those craft sticks is a nice way to physically attend to the bilateral coordination needed in handwriting tasks.

We used both the jumbo-sized craft sticks and the regular size to build more pencil control. Use a sharpie marker to get a thicker line for building line awareness.

After you’ve got your shapes on the paper, hand over a bunch of brightly colored fine point markers. You can do some tangle art that is described in Tangle Art Drawing Games for Kids: A Silly Book for Creative and Visual Thinking or you can make letters and numbers in the craft stick shapes. Try adding color to a section and then make shapes and letters in the color.

It is fun for kids to make hidden messages in the shapes by spelling out a name or word with all of the letters.

If your kiddo is VERY anti-letters, try working on spatial awareness and pencil control by practicing the writing strokes needed for letter formation. Instruct them to make counter clockwise circles close to one another, diagonal lines, horizontal and vertical lines, and mountain shapes.

Encourage them to use those fine point markers to write very closely spaced lines. We also tried a few cursive line formations.

For the younger crowd, this activity is great for pre-writing skills, too. Coloring in the shapes encourages the motor skills needed to move the pencil in handwriting.

Now go off and make art while working on handwriting! Don’t forget to grab your copy of Tangle Art Drawing Games for Kids: A Silly Book for Creative and Visual Thinking! You will love it!!

Visual Closure Activity Bugs Theme

February 17, 2023April 14, 2016 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

There is a lot that goes into reading and writing. One of the skills that makes up the ability to read words and form letters in handwriting tasks with fluency is visual closure. Visual Closure is the ability of the eyes to visualize a complete image or object when only a portion is seen. A child can see just part of a letter or number when reading and recognize how to write that figure. They can read a word or sentence without focusing on each letter and how it is made. Visual Closure is an essential skill for reading with fluency. It’s necessary for written work to happen without concentrating on each letter’s lines and curves. Visual Closure allows us to comprehend words and letters without actively assessing each line.

Children with difficulties in visual closure may have trouble completing mazes, puzzles, or worksheets. They might have difficulty identifying items that are partially obscured by other items, such as finding a serving spoon hidden in a draw full of items. They might have difficulty with spelling or math tasks or concepts.

Visual Closure Worksheets

This post contains affiliate links.

These visual closure worksheets can help work on the skills needed to develop visual closure. You can get these worksheets as a FREE resource if you join our newsletter subscriber list. These worksheets and tons others are included in our subscriber-only library.

To use these visual closure worksheets: Match up the bug on the left with the bug on the right. We used yarn to complete the match so that we could re-use this sheet. You could also laminate these to re-use.

For the second worksheet, match up the broken bug image with the rotated bugs. Have your child circle the bug that matches the broken bug exactly.

Looking for more bug activities? Try these:

Looking for more visual perception activities for kids? Try these:

Create your own race track

Benefits of Stickers in Occupational Therapy

Visual Tracking with Cardboard Tubes

Second Grade Math Outdoor Learning Idea

August 11, 2022April 13, 2016 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

There is nothing like learning in the great outdoors. The breeze in your hair, the birds tweeting, and bugs getting involved in the outdoor classroom. Learning outside with the kids is a fun twist on the everyday math homework! We love to spend time outdoors. And, I love to sneak learning activities into our play. This Math Scavenger Hunt idea was a fun way to practice second grade math concepts like adding and subtracting two digit numbers. Our math rocks made this move and learn activity extra fun.

We’ve shared quite a few outdoor learning activities on the blog before. The favorite in our back yard was this pre-reading literacy activity. We even used a few of the same hiding places for today’s math activity.