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:

S Themed Sensory Bin: sticks, sand, stones

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We’ve been on a bit of a sensory bin kick lately.  Summer weather permits tons of outside play and the water bin is the way to go during hot sunny days.  This sensory bin is one in a series that we’ve been working on and will continue to add to over a (probably) loooong time. 



ABC’s of Sensory Bins

 
We’re hoping to hit all of the letters of the alphabet in our ABC’s of Sensory Bins series.  Each sensory bin is an easy and fun way to play with the kids while focusing on one letter at a time. 
Being a sensory bin, it’s a great way to explore textures, language, and now letters too as we play.  Each sensory bin in our series will contain only 2-3 ingredients (simple!) and begin with the same letter. 
We’re not going through the alphabet in sequential order, but hopping around.  Each bin will eventually be added to a giant list of the ABC’s of sensory bins.  Come along and play with us.  We’re ready to have some sensory bin fun!
"S" themed sensory bin using basic items.

 


S themed sensory bin

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We LOVE our Sand and Water Table.  We’ve used it in SO many water table activities.  This one was thrown together in a matter of minutes since we still had sand in the water table at the time.  Both sections of the water table were filled with sand and ready for a “S” themed play.
Easy sensory bin with sticks, stones, and sand
We started with a bin full of sand and went on a hunt through the yard for some nice sized sticks. 
Some were a little too big and needed to be snapped to fit little hands.  Little Guy liked to help with the snapping. 
The old snapping the twigs over the knee trick was a huge hit and we had a pretty big pile of snapped twigs thanks to his handy work!
A couple of handfuls of river rock to the bin and we were ready for simple sensory bin play!
"S" sensory bin for kids with simple items for basic play.

Imagination Play in a Sensory Bin

Sand, sticks, and stones made up an easy (SIMPLE) sensory bin ready for imagination and play.  We built paths with the stones, bridges and huts with the sticks, and tunnels through the sand.
Simple "S" sensory bin for pretend play and imagination
Little Guy made a few traps for bad guys.
…And had to add in his dinosaurs for more pretend play fun!
This "S" themed sensory bin uses basic items for pretend play and imagination.

We had a blast with our first simple sensory bin.  Here’s to hoping we get this series up and running with loads of new sensory bins for you to enjoy too!  Looking for more sensory bin fun?  Try one of these ideas:

Snowy Farm Sensory Bin
Multi-Age Letter Learning Sensory Bin
Rainbow Sensory Bins
 You may want to see more of our Sensory Bins here.

This Little Piggy Went to the Market craft

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Is there a song or nursery rhyme that is a huge hit in your house?  You know the one that is said over and over (and over) again?  Right now we are on a This Little Piggy Went to the Market kick.  Baby Girl (age 2 and a half) loooooooves This Little Piggy.  She will ask me to do the finger play rhyme on both feet and then both hands again and again.  I’ve even heard her saying it to herself…with lots of adorable mistakes.  It’s beyond cute.  I love when she asks me, “Mom, what does this piggy do?” and points to a toe.  What a cutie!
When we made this piggy craft, Baby Girl very excited.  I told her we were making a This Little Piggy craft and she was so happy!

"This Little Piggy Went to the Market" craft for kids

This Little Piggy Went to the Market craft for Toddlers

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This craft for toddlers is very easy and a great opportunity for some learning, too.  You can talk to your Toddler about circles and sizes (big and little).  Toddlers are learning concepts such as size awareness and you can show them the big and little circles as you build the pigs.

I started with 5 big circles cut from pink construction paper and 15 small circles.  We counted out the big circles together.

I helped Baby Girl fold ten of the small circles in half.  These will be the pigs ears.

Big Sister helped out a little with counting out our piggy ears.

Baby Girl is all about using the glue stick.  This Little Piggy Went to the Market + glue stick
= Baby Girl’s best day ever!  She went crazy gluing on the big circles, ears, and snouts.

Craft idea for This Little Piggy finger play.

After all of the pieces were glued in place, I drew on little faces.  We had fun saying the finger play while using our five little piggys to join in on the fun.  Baby Girl played with these little piggys all day!

Visual Motor Scanning Activity to Color Match

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Visual Motor Integration is also known as eye hand coordination.  Essentially, this skill is the ability to coordinate the hand in an effective manner directed by vision.  When relying on visual motor skills, a person coordinates their movements based on what they see.  A child requires effective visual motor skills in order to do so many tasks…forming letters, writing on a line, coloring within lines, cutting along a line, catching a ball, completing puzzles, reading, and so much more. 
This fun (and colorful) activity is easy to create at home and a fun way to work on visual motor integration.  We added a color matching component to our activity, but you can adjust this activity to include what ever best keeps your child’s attention.
Visual scanning and visual motor color matching activity for kids

Visual Motor Color Matching Activity

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I started by drawing small circles all over a sheet of construction paper.  I used a bunch of different colors that matched the colors of stickers we had.  These rainbow stickers are the perfect size for little fingers to peel and work on fine motor skills.
Use stickers to color match and work on eye-hand coordiantion, fine motor skills.
I had Baby Girl (aged 2 and a half) peel off the stickers and place them on the circles.  Scanning for the matching color works on those eye-hand coordination abilities and also works on color identification. 
This was also a great way for Little Guy (age 4) to work on his visual motor skills.  He’s working on letter formation and ability to write in a smaller space with better control.  The fine motor and visual motor work in the activity are perfect for the new hand writer.
Eye hand coordination is tested and practiced with this easy color matching activity for kids.

This is such an easy way to work on so many skills.  We’ll be doing this activity again, for sure, with a few modifications.  Instead of matching colors to colored circles, try matching letters, numbers, emotions, and more!

What are other ways you can work on visual motor skills at home?

 

    • Tic Tack Toe

 

    • Copying shapes/drawings

 

    • tracing paper

 

    • mazes

 

    • dot to dot pictures

 

    • pegboard designs

 

    • copying lite brite designs

 

    • rolling and catching a ball

 

    • flashlight tag

Outdoors Small World Pretend Play

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Ok, so you know we like sensory bins and pretend play, right?  Small world pretend play is such a fun way to invoke imagination, language, fine motor skills, confidence, and so many more important skills in kids.  This small world activity is one of our favorite ways to play outside. 
(AND, it’s perfect for those times when mama needs a little break from chasing kids around the yard and needs to sit for a minute with some quiet play with the kids!)
The kids love when I pull out our bin of animals when we’re outside.  We take a great the big outdoors and make it into a miniature small world all with just our imagination.
Why not take a bunch of little pretend play figures outside and see where the pretend play goes?


Inspire pretend play and imagination with small world play in the outdoors.

 


Pretend play outdoors

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We have a big old basket of little animal figures, creatures, bugs, and animals of all kinds.  There have been cheers when this basket is pulled out.  We’ve added the critters to our sand and water table
lots of times for water play, creative play in the sand/birdseed/snow.  There’s something about just the plain old outdoors that really inspires imagination!

We played one day with our little animals around a big old tree in our backyard one day while mom snapped a few pictures.  We had an absolute blast!

There were sheep grazing in the moss fields.

And cows climbing tree trunks.  Little Guy had a pretty cool pretend play story going on here.  The cows had incredible climbing skills and were running from giant lizards.  He stuck the little figures into the bark and saved the farm!

I love this pretend play happening here!

This giraffe needs saving!

How can you inspire pretend play and imagination in the outdoors?  Grab a few toys that don’t normally go outside and create the ultimate small world in the great big outdoors!

Looking for more fun ways to play outside?  Check out our Creative Outdoor Play Pinterest board for lots of inspiring ways to play:

Styrofoam Building Shapes

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Styrofoam isn’t just for packaging!  We saved a few sheets of these packaging sheets before they went into the trash and created a learning and play activity a while back. 

Styrofoam building shapes

I cut a couple of sheets into different shapes and showed the kids how we could make pictures on the table.  We made houses, buildings, and cars with our DIY tangrams.  We talked about shapes with Baby Girl and Little Guy.  This was a fun beginning math activity for both of them.

After a while with 2 dimensional play, I pulled out the tooth picks and we began building.  Things got fun at this point!

We made trees, houses, furniture, and more with these shapes.  Little Guy LOVED this!  He built challenges for his cars to jump and drive around. 

What a fun way to create and imagine! 

NOTE:  This should definitely be a supervised activity.  Those tooth picks are sharp, for sure.  With adult supervision, this is a great building activity and lots of fun for the imagination. 

You also might like: 
DIY Shape Stamps
Styrofoam Fish Math Activity

Teaching Math Through Play

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Math is such a fun subject for kids to learn.  They begin at such a small age with sorting, patterns, and then grow in their skills during each step of development.  It’s been really cool to watch Big Sister this past school year as she started to learn Kindergarten math skills and then become confident with those abilities.  She even said at her end of the school year Kindergarten graduation that her favorite memory of the year was “math”! 

There is so much talk about the “summer slide” that happens with kids during their summer break.  These ideas from the Share It Saturday link up are a great way to prevent the slide…or just have fun with math!  I love that these activities promote math skills in a fun way.  And, they don’t need to be done during the summer, they are perfect for year-round math fun!

We’re keeping the linky party live all month so be sure to stop back each week and link up your posts!

Playful ways to teach math
 

Playful Math Activities for Kids


LEGO Math Games from JDaniel4’s Mom

Montessori Math Trays from Racheous

Teach Multiplication the Easy Way from True Aim Education

Rubber Duck Math from Fantastic Fun and Learning

Patterns with gems from Dabbling Mama

Composing and Decomposing Numbers from Sugar Aunts

Nature Math from Sugar Aunts

Shape sorting and patterns from Sugar Aunts

Feel free to grab our button:

 

Check out who the other hosts are featuring today:
 Life & Lessons From a Country Road 

The Share It Saturday Pinterest board has loads of fun ideas for play and learning.
 
Grab the Share It Saturday party button:
Grab button for Sugar-Aunts

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You may like more math activities on our Playful Math Pinterest board:

Fireworks Art

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Summer brings cookouts, backyard parties, swimming pools, and fireworks!  We were in the mood for some summer fun and creating these fireworks painting art did the job.  A little bit of sparkle made the artwork really pop.  And what art isn’t better without a little glitter, right??
 
Stamped fireworks art! This is perfect for fourth of july, memorial day, and any day with fireworks!
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Fireworks Artwork Craft

We started with blobs of red paint
and blue paint on a Styrofoam tray.  Add a handful of
cotton swabs
and we were ready to go.

We used the cotton swabs to stamp the red and blue paint onto white paper into our fireworks shapes.  Stamping the paint covered cotton swabs was a super messy and sensory painting experience.  We mixed the colors for some of the fireworks to get a nice red and blue mixture into purple.  This was a great time to talk about the colors and how they mix to make purple.

The fireworks painting needed a little something.

GLITTER!

Fine Motor Fireworks Activity

We used clear glitter
and sprinkled it on while the paint was still wet.  It stuck right onto the paint and made our fireworks really pop. 
Pinching the glitter was such a good way to work on fine motor strength during a fun craft activity.  Using the index, middle finger, and thumb to grab up the glitter and sprinkle it around is a great tripod grasp task.  Using those three fingers to manipulate a material like glitter in a controlled manner strengthens the intrinsic muscles of the hand.  Intrinsic muscles are those little muscles within the hand that are essential for controlled pencil manipulation and many other fine motor tasks.
This fireworks painting craft was just right for some easy sensory summer fun.  Celebrate the season with fireworks art! 
You may be interested in more patriotic crafts and activities.  Try these:
red, white, and blue goopy dough
 red, white, and blue easel art | fine motor auditory fireworks activity

Sparkle Collage Art Painting

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Do you have a little one who LOVES all things art and painting?  Baby Girl is all about painting and will get messy with paints every day.  In fact, she asks almost every day to paint (and so we do, almost every day!) This is a great fine motor creative painting tool to support fine motor development skills.
This Sparkle Collage Art painting was very fun for Baby Girl (and me!)  We sat for a long time and just painted away, with loads of sparkly texture added.  What isn’t better with sparkle and sequins???


Sparkle Collage Art

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We recieved the spangles free from www.craftprojectideas.com and they really made our paintings shine.  The sparkly shapes were the perfect touch to this multi-textural painting.
Other supplies needed for this activity are Markers, paints,
Spill Proof Paint Cups,
glue, and paint brushes.

We poured paint into the spill proof cups and dumped in a handful of the spangle mix.  Add a bit of glue and mix it all together.

I drew a few pictures and doodles on with the markers and let Baby Girl start painting.  She started out just using the paint to color in the pictures, but once I showed her how to paint on the sparkles and sequins, she got in on the sparkly fun.

These spill proof cups are big hits in our house.  For this painting activity, we didn’t use the sloped part so we could get at the sequins with the paint brushes.

Painting on those sequins required a little bit of dexterity, but Baby Girl did a pretty good job of it!  It was fun to paint on the sparkly shapes.

How pretty is this??

Older children could draw the pictures themselves and then paint on the sparkles and sequins.
You could also add glitter into your paint.  What a gorgeous work of art this is!

Baby girl was very proud of her painting.  These turned out to be so pretty.

Let us know if you try this painting activity.  We would love to see your works of art!
Looking for more ways to paint in a creative way?  Stop by and follow along on our Creative Painting Pinterest board.  I’m loving all of the creative ideas over there!

Circus Preschool Toddler Theme Summer Camp at Home

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We’re joining up with the awesome bloggers in the All Things Kids community to bring your creative and fun ideas to get your summer off to a great start.  So, the kids are out of school and ready for some fun.  The running around in the sprinkler and riding bikes are perfect to start off a summer of freedom.  But, what happens when the first “I’m bored” starts?  We’ve got you covered on ideas to keep the kids moving, learning, and creating this summer.  Each of us All Things Kids bloggers are bringing you ideas for themed activities.  These would be perfect too in place of a summer camp or vacation bible school and just do an at-home summer camp with the kids.  Why not invite a few friends over and start your own backyard summer camp for the kids? 

Backyard Summer Camp

It’s that simple to create a neighborhood summer camp!  Pull up the ideas from the all things kids bloggers and you’ve got 7 weeks of themes covered for a summer of camp fun.  We’ve found the best crafts, activities, snacks, and more all based on each week’s theme.  I’m ready for a backyard summer!
Check out all of the summer camp ideas: Robots, Bugs  Around the World , Animals, Ocean and Beach, Nature, and today’s post by us…Circus!

We’re scouring the net for the best and most creative ways to make your own Circus themed Summer Camp for preschoolers and toddlers.  We’ve got circus crafts, circus snacks, circus fine motor and gross motor activities to get the summer off to great start. 


Circus Theme Crafts

The kids will love a few circus crafts.  These lion, tiger, and monkey masks (Danya Banya) will keep the kids occupied and pretending. Or try this elephant mask craft (East Coast Mommy) for more pretend play.  For more circus animal crafts, try this activity from Inspired Treehouse.  

Kids will love making a craft a day at your backyard camp.  Make this elephant mask (Mamas Like Me) and they can wear it throughout the week. Children can work on so many important developmental areas while developing their scissor skills.  If painting is more your thing, this lion craft (Sassy Dealz) is a super cute circus animal to make.   Need a few more crafts to keep the kids busy with your circus theme?  I love these circus clown costumes (KangarooBoo blog) made with party hats and paper plates.

We loved making our circus tent craft.  This trapeze artist craft (Boy Mama Teacher Mama) is equally cute! A handprint zoo (House of Burke) would be a great memento to remember your week of circus fun.


Circus Theme Snacks

A backyard summer camp or themed learning unit definitely needs snacks to keep little ones going and energy levels high.  Here’s a few circus themed ideas for snack time:
  • Goldfish in a bag (You won goldfish!)
  • animal crackers
  • popcorn
  • Sandwiches cut into fun circus shapes with circus cookie cutters (and then reuse those cookie cutters for stamp art painting later in the week!)


    • A    dd these things to a little peanut butter (or other nut butter) for some protein.


Circus Theme Gross Motor Backyard Activities

I know a few little ones who would LOVE this water gun game (Driven By Décor).  Use a few ping pong balls and a squirt gun for an easy (and summer-ific) carnival game. Inspired Treehouse put together put together three gross motor circus activities.  A ball toss game would be easy to set up with a few bins and some bean bags or balls. 


Circus Theme Sensory Activities

The kids (and moms) will get a kick out of a fun circus sensory activity.  How cool is this popcorn painting activity (Mess for Less)? We put together a few fun ideas for circus sensory bins in our circus party essentials post

 


Circus Theme Learning

Any circus unit or backyard camp needs circus books!  These are some of our favorites.