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:

Rainbow Cardboard Tube Craft

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We love creating crafts and activities with recycled materials.  One of our favorite materials is Cardboard tubes!  Paper towel rolls, wrapping paper rolls, aluminum foil cardboard rolls…So much can be made with and from them!  We’ve done cardboard tube stamp roll painting, cardboard tube rainbow binoculars, and even a cardboard tube juice box cover with them. 
This Rainbow craft was fun to make and even more fun to play with.  We’ve been using it in all kinds of pretend play activities lately.

Cardboard Tube Rainbow Craft

This post is part of the Project Create & Recycle series and this month’s theme is cardboard tubes.  We can’t wait to see all of the fun crafts and activities linked up this month.  Check them out on the blogs and the links below.

We started with a plain paper tube and just pulled out the paints.  I didn’t get any shots of the kids painting this one, but it was fun!  Once the paint dried, I cut strait down the tube to make the rainbow arch.

Fine Motor Skills:

A little glue and one cotton ball for each side of the rainbow were all we needed to finish our rainbow.  Fine motor tip:  Pulling a cotton ball into a strand is an excellent way to practice fine motor skills.  Pulling the cotton ball into a strand without ripping the cotton requires a tripod grasp and strength of the arches of both hands.  This is a great way to strengthen those muscles need for an appropriate grasp on a writing utensil.  Pulling cotton balls into strips of cotton is a fine motor strengthening activity that we will definitely be doing again.

So, how did we play with our rainbows after they were done?  Watch this space, you’ll be seeing these rainbows again, soon!

Do you have any cardboard tube activities or crafts to share?  Tell us about them!

Spring Sensory Water Bin Play Date Activity

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We are so excited to share our first Spring activity of the year!  This winter has been a loooong one! (and with it still being frigidly cold out side with inches of snow on the ground…the actual first signs of Spring seem a long way off!)
This Spring Sensory Water Bin is part of the All Things Kids bloggers Spring Sensory Play Date Activities series during the month of March.  We put this water bin together to celebrate Spring and friends.  What better way to kick off warmth and sunshine with a playdate with friends.  When you get a few toddler or preschool-aged friends together, what better way to play than with sensory play activities? 

This Spring themed activity is perfect for a play date.

Spring Sensory Water Bin

{Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}

RELATED READ: Simple Spring Sensory
Play date activity with a sensory and fine motor Spring theme.
We are big fans of water bins for play and this one was no different!  We started with a bin of water scented with Pomegranate Body Scrub.  Just a little bit of the bath salts were all we needed to scent the water with a nice Spring fresh scent.  Any scented bath salts (or body wash/bubble bath) would work.  We just wanted to get a fresh scent and the rose colored water. 
You’ll want to watch smaller children who are playing with this water bin very closely.  You don’t want any tastes of the scented water, and especially if salts are being used!  Use your best judgment and if there is a concern, eliminate the scented portion of this activity.  Regular water would work fin, or even a few drops of food coloring, if you want to achieve the colored part of the water bin.
Tulip and butterfly water bin for a Spring play date.
I added a few foam butterfly crafting sheets
and foam tulip crafting sheets to the water bin and a handful of foam Spring stickers.  When these foam sheets and stickers get wet, they can stick to the foam and plastic plates very easily.  They can be removed and placed again and again without difficulty.
This is a perfect activity for a Spring play date.

Placing these foam stickers on the large foam sheets is a great way to practice tip to tip grasp and fine motor skills.  baby Girl had a hard time understanding that the sticker’s backs would not peel off once they were wet, but she got the hang of just placing the foam shapes in different places once I showed her.

Kids love to explore senses in water play. This Spring themed sesnory activity is great for a play date.

Scooping up the floating shapes from the scented water was so much fun and a great way to practice visual scanning and eye-hand coordination, too.  We didn’t add any scoops to this activity, but a few kitchen utensils like large spoons or an ice cream scoop would be a fun way to further extend this sensory water bin.

Toddlers will love this Spring-themed water bin.

Baby Girl just enjoyed getting her hands in the water and grabbing up the shapes.  Sensory play at it’s finest!

Sensory and fine motor play perfect for Spring!
We used our plastic plates
to sort and play with the foam stickers.  The wet stickers stuck nicely to the plastic plates, too.
Scented water adds a sensory component to a Spring water bin.
What is water play without a little scooping and transferring?  A couple of small bowls and a turkey baster were perfect for more fine motor play in our Spring water bin. 
Using the turkey baster to transfer scented water not only stimulates the senses, but works on gross hand grasp.  What a great fine motor strengthening tool the turkey baster is! 
Hopefully this is inspiration for your next play date.  If you’re worried about the mess, you could set this up in a small baby pool or in a bath tub.  If you’re in warmer climates than we are, take it outside.  I know we will be re-doing this activity once the weather turns and we can get outside!
Let us know if you do this Spring Sensory Water bin or something like it.  We would love to hear about it or see pictures.  Just stop by our Facebook page and share your fun with us!
Be sure to catch all of the other Spring Sensory Play Date Activities being posted this week over at our bloggy friend’s sites:
Crayon Box Chronicles
Do you have a Spring Sensory activity to share?  Link it up all month long below.  we will be pinning to the All Things Kids Pinterest board and creating a round-up of fun Spring Sensory Play Date Activities at the end of the month.  We would love to feature YOU!

Sensory play activity with rocks

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We are huge fans of sensory play around here.  This super simple rock activity kept the kids occupied for a long time one day.  It doesn’t take much to keep a couple of toddlers and preschoolers busy when you give them a bin of soapy water and something to clean!  Sensory play and fine motor play go hand in hand with this rock activity.


Sensory play with rocks

 

Sensory play with rocks

{Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}
sensory and fine motor fun with rocks
We started with a bin of river rocks
that we’ve had for ages.  These little rocks were a little dusty from spending the winter outside.  before we could play with them, they needed a scrub down.  
A bin of warm soapy water, a colander, and clean water and we all we needed  to set up this easy activity.  Throw in a scrub brush and sponge and we were ready to go.
sensory activity for kids using rocks and soapy water.
Little Guy loved this activity.  He scrubbed the rocks clean!  Using the scrub brush is a great way to work on bilateral land coordination to hold the brush and the rock…and tripod grasp to hold the little rocks.

playing with rocks and a soapy bin of water is a great fine motor and sensory activity for kids.
Baby Girl got in on this soapy fun too.  This sensory activity was so neat to play with the suds and find the rocks at the bottom of the bin.

squeezing a sponge is a great fine motor exersice for kids.

Squeezing a sponge is a great way to work on gross grasp of the hands.  Little Guy said, “this is the best fun, Mom!” …success!

washing rocks is a great fine motor and sensory activity for kids.

Our rocks were nice and scrubbed clean and ready for play.  And now to get them doing dishes…

Spring Sensory Play Date Activities from All Things Kids

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Signs of spring are on their way!  Use the sensory activities listed below to create a sensory playdate filled with everything Spring. It’s the perfect time of year to meet up with friends and play through the senses!

Spring Sensory Play Date Activities!

We wanted to put together fun activities and ideas for Spring sensory-themed play dates.  Invite a few friends over, pull out the old sheet, and get ready for some sensory based play this season.  These would be great ideas for preschool classroom activities, too.  Sensory play is so important for children.  There is so much learning that happens when kids get messy and explore textures.  They are learning new concepts such as cause and effect while developing language and self-confidence.  Sensory play can be based on anything!  These Spring-themed sensory play ideas will keep you and the kids occupied and having fun this month while the weather turns.  Don’t stress the mess and have fun!

The bloggers below present a fun and sensory-tastic Spring activity that covers each day of the week, and are perfect for creating a Spring playdate that covers all things sensory. 

These are the sensory activities you won’t want to miss this Spring:

Monday: Crayon Box Chronicles brings us Melting Insect Sensory Painting
Tuesday: The OT Toolbox (that’s us!) shares Spring Sensory Water bin
Wednesday: All Done Monkey shows how to have a Spring Sensory Outdoor Activity
Thursday: House of Burke created a soapy color-mixing sensory bin. How fun! 
Saturday:  Fun-A-Day

How to incorporate sensory play into playing outside

Sensory diet activities can be specific to sensory system like these vestibular sensory diet activities. Sensory activities can be prescribed according to need along with environment in order to maximize sensory input within a child’s day such as within the school day. Using authentic sensory input within the child’s environment plays into the whole child that we must understand when focusing on any goal toward improved functional independence. 

Many sensory diet activities can naturally be found outdoors. In fact, outdoor sensory diet activities are a fun way to encourage sensory input in a child’s environment and without fancy therapy equipment or tools. 

It’s a fact that kids are spending less time playing outdoors. From after-school schedules to two working parents, to unsafe conditions, to increased digital screen time, to less outdoor recess time…kids just get less natural play in the outdoors. Some therapists have connected the dots between less outdoor play and increased sensory struggles and attention difficulties in learning. 

Knowing this, it can be powerful to have a list of outdoor sensory diet activities that can be recommended as therapy home programing and family activities that meet underlying needs.

That’s where the Outdoor Sensory Diet Cards and Sensory Challenge Cards come into play.

They are a FREE printable resource that encourages sensory diet strategies in the outdoors. In the printable packet, there are 90 outdoor sensory diet activities, 60 outdoor recess sensory diet activities, 30 blank sensory diet cards, and 6 sensory challenge cards. They can be used based on preference and interest of the child, encouraging motivation and carryover, all while providing much-needed sensory input.

Here’s a little more information about the Outdoor Sensory Diet Cards
  • 90 outdoor sensory diet activities
  • 60 outdoor recess sensory diet activities
  • 30 blank sensory diet cards, and 6 sensory challenge cards
  • They can be used based on preference and interest of the child, encouraging motivation and carryover, all while providing much-needed sensory input. 
  • Research tells us that outdoor play improves attention and provides an ideal environment for a calm and alert state, perfect for integration of sensory input.
  • Outdoor play provides input from all the senses, allows for movement in all planes, and provides a variety of strengthening components including eccentric, concentric, and isometric muscle contractions. 
  • Great tool for parents, teachers, AND therapists!


Be sure to grab the Outdoor Sensory Diet Cards and use them with a child (or adult) with sensory processing needs!

Outdoor sensory diet activity cards for parents, teachers, and therapists of children with sensory processing needs.

DIY Shape Stamps

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These DIY Shape stampers were part of a craft we made waaaaaay back at the beginning of the month before Valentine’s Day. (HOW did February fly by so fast???)  We cut heart shapes from Styrofoam packaging sheets and stamped hearts.  The hearts decorated our front window for a few weeks.  While we stamped the hearts, I cut out a few other shapes from the Styrofoam sheet and had a little fun with shapes!

Shape Stamps

Creative painting with styrofoam shape stamps

This was a simple craft and creative way to paint while learning about shapes.  baby Girl is only just learning her shapes and calls everything a triangle.  Little Guy is happy to help her out with the correct shape name…calling out the shape before she even has a chance to answer!

A few shapes cut from Styrofoam sheets were all we needed to get started.  We stamped the shapes in red paint but adding more colors in there would made a fun creative painting art project.

Some of the shapes didn’t turn out exactly like they should have…but it was fun!

Stamping with these palm-sized stamps is a fun way to cross midline (reaching across the middle of the body) as Baby Girl reached to dip the shape in paint and then to stamp the shape onto the paper.  Crossing midline is an important skill for little ones.  This activity would be great for kids with special needs or difficulty using one hand/arm. 

Baby Girl wanted to paint some of her stamps too.  She is big-time into all things painting!

Our DIY stamps turned out to be a lot of fun and a great way to decorate our window for a holiday.  We re-used our hearts and made a fun spring flower with the prints.  Watch this space to see more crafty fun and see where this project went!
We’ve been having fun with our Styrofoam activities this month.  Lots of fun activities are linked up and if you’ve got any fun Styrofoam blog posts, be sure to stop by and share them with us! 

Colorful ways to learn and play

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After months of wintery gray skies and freezing temps, we are ready to play with some rainbows and sunshine!  It may still be cold and the snow is still out there, but we can play with color to brighten our day! These features from Share It Saturday have colorful ways to learn and play.  Look out colors, here we come!





Try the celery experiment with every color of the rainbow. (P is for Preschooler)
Set up an invitation to create and play with colorful parts, play dough, pieces, and manipulatives.  The learning is non-stop! (Laughing Kids Learn)
Prepare a St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Sink with rainbows galore. (Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails)
Match colors in a color matching water bin. (Sugar Aunts)
Dye pasta in a rainbow of colors for sensory play, crafts, activities, counting, and exploring. (The Connection We Share)
Encourage fine motor skills with rainbow fine motor play. (Sugar Aunts)
Create colorful magnetic art with a bunch of different colored pipe cleaners. (Munchkins and Moms)
Build sculptures with colored ice sculptures outside in the snow, or bring the fun inside for colorful art. (Happy Hooligans)
Build a pom pom catapult and toss all colors across the room. (3 Dinosaurs)

More colorful play ideas:
Make your own colored sand.  It’s simple, I promise!
Paint a rainbow with a recycled egg carton.
Create a few rainbow sensory bins for hours of colorful play.
Use lots of different colored tissue paper to play with tissue paper and work on fine motor skills.
Paint snow.  Indoors or outside!

Snowman Craft Fine Motor Winter Craft for Kids

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Winter crafts are one of our favorites!  When it’s so cold outside and the snow is blowing around, it’s so much fun to just create a fun craft with a pile of paint, glitter, and STUFF!  We’ve done quite a few winter crafts around here and this cute little snowman craft is a fun one to add to the list.
Spring seems to be a long way off with all of the snow outside, and this snowman has been happily hanging out on our dining room wall as we wait for any signs of spring. 

 

Snowman Craft for Kids

 {Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}

We started out with a few supplies: black pony beads, orange felt, white paper condiment cups, glue, and markers.

Baby Girl glued three of the condiment cups on a sheet of paper with a. lot. of glue.  But isn’t a ton of glue always involved in crafts with two year olds 😉

This dried. Eventually.

We cut a little triangle from the orange felt and glued that on.  We drew a cute little smile and arms with the marker and then decided to draw buttons on too.  You could totally use the pony beads, but that didn’t happen with this cute snowman.

What fun winter crafts have you done?  Stop by our Facebook page and share the pictures or links with us. And be sure to “like” if you’re not already.  We would love to have you join us!

Visual Motor Activity for Learning and Scanning, Eye-hand Coordination

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We shared a great bubble wrap activity yesterday and are continuing again today with another fun learning through play activity with the awesomeness of bubble wrap!   This time we did some visual scanning to work on letters of Little Guy’s name, letter sounds (a great pre-reading activity!), color awareness with Baby Girl, and eye-hand coordination as we popped the bubbles.  Sounds like a super fun way to play and learn, right?!?
Visual Motor activities are very important to the pre-hand writer…and new handwrites, too.  Learning to place those letters on the lines and be aware of how much space is left on the page is part of visual-motor skills.  So is line awareness when cutting.  And even, moving with large muscles as we carry items in the home or classroom.  We have to be aware of how much space is around us and this is where visual-motor awareness comes into play.  
Visual scanning (scanning with the eyes across a page, for example) and hand-eye coordination (using the hands in a coordinated manner based on what the eyes are telling us) are both part of Visual Motor Skills.  Visual Motor activities are a fun way to play while working on these important skills.


This visual motor activity is a great way to work on visual scanning, eye-hand coordination, and letter and color awareness.

 

Visual Motor Activity to work on visual scanning and hand-eye coordination

We started our fun with these funny faces stickers from www.craftprojectideas.com/.  We received them free of charge and have been loving the silly faces in our crafts.  The colors were perfect for this activity.  Baby GIrl stuck the stickers onto a piece of paper and together we worked on colors.  She can tell me some of the colors, but most of the time, needs help.  These stickers were a fun way to practice!
Kids can work on color awareness with colored stickers in this visual motor activity.
{Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}
Once the stickers were in place, I taped a piece of bubble wrap on top of the stickers.  Now we were ready to get to popping!
Preschoolers will love locating and identifying letters in their name as they visually scan.
Little Guy used a Window Marker
to dot the colored stickers as I called out a color. 

  

Use window markers and scan for colors, letters
He had to visually can the paper to locate the color he needed.  Pushing hard enough with the marker provided a nice “pop” when he dabbed the bubble.  Using his hands in a coordinated way to dab the correct bubble worked on hand-eye coordination.  Because of the bubble wrap on top of the stickers, he had to make sure it was aligned correctly.

Children can visually scan for letters and develop eye-hand coordination to locate letters.
Next, we tried this with the letters in his name.  I had extra letters, plus the letters in his name and asked him to dab all of the ones that he needed for his name.  Scanning across the page in all directions was fun way to explore letter identification as he visually scanned top to bottom and side to side.  He again worked on those hand-eye coordination skills as he popped the correct bubbles.
More playful ways to practice hand-eye coordination and visual scanning :

Playful Math Learning Thorough Play

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It’s Share It Saturday time again! We hope you’ve had a wonderful week of fun.  The links this week were very fun to look though (You guys are SO talented and creative!)  This week’s features bring us creative and fun ways to learn math concepts through play.  We’ve got nature and sensory-based math, items to count, sort, and pattern, fun ways to graph, and more.  If you’ve got a little one who is learning early math ideas to multiplication…these Playful Math ideas are for you! 
 

 

Playful ways to explore math concepts


Math in Nature:

Use nature to Play with rocks (An Idea on Tuesday) and learn number awareness, counting, and more.  Or, try something different like counting nature (Sugar Aunts).
 


Counting fun objects:

Use many different objects to Count to 100 (KCEdventures). 
While you’re looking for objects to count, try early learning with pistachios (B-Inspired Mama).
Or even add roses for hands on learning (3 Dinosaurs).   Explore Composing and Decomposing Numbers with a snowman theme. (Sugar Aunts)
 


Math Concepts using Candy:

Practice graphing (Fantastic Fun and Learning) with all of that left over Valentine’s Day chocolate.  Really love those sweets?  Practice measuring with candy (Buggy and Buddy). 
 


Patterns in Play:

 Explore shapes, patterns, and sorting (Sugar Aunts) with Wikki Stix.  Or, take the patterns outside to try snow patterns (Sugar Aunts).


 Creative counting:

Something like photocopies can be used for counting and times tables (My Little 3 and Me).  Craft something fun, like honey bee hives to explore numbers and counting (Sugar Aunts).
 


Sensory Math:

Match, count, and order numbers using a Math sensory bin (Little Bins for Little Hands).
 
 
Need more ideas? After School For Smarty Pants has 100 ways to make math fun at home.
 
 
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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.
 
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Looking for more fun math ideas?  Follow along on our Playful Math Pinterest board!