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:
Somehow we cannot avoid the Peeps around Easter time…they always end up in the house. My daughter and I made this popcorn mixture as a snack for the annual cousin Easter egg hunt. We thought it was pretty yummy (and fun to make)!
I pretty much made it like you would make a Rice Krispie treats.
Make approx 6 cups popcorn
1/2 stick butter
6 rows Peeps
M&M’s
sprinkles
First, pop some plain popcorn kernels into a large bowl.
Melt half a stick of butter and add some marshmallows and peeps. I added a few more marshmallows for some extra goo. You could definitely add only peeps (try adding different colors).
I will admit that my daughter and I both made a few whimpers as we watched these little cute peeps melt:(
Once it has melted together to make a soupy gooey mixture stir it all together.
We added a few extras…egg sprinkles, white chocolate M&M’s, and pretzel M&M’s.
A glance at our week includes lots of play, hanging out, and preparing for Easter.
Here are a couple of shots of our week:
We did a lot of this:
A little of this:
And a kiddie baking session. This cake is so good (despite it’s looks!) It calls for a can of crushed pineapple in place of oil. It doesn’t take much sugar and is still sweet from the pineapple juice. We had a lot of fun making our mini cakes. ((Big Sister and Little Guy each decorated their own layer.))
We used up a TON of Christmas sprinkles 🙂
Our most popular post of the week was our Creative Sensory Themed Easter Eggs. Looking for a fun and sensory inspired technique to dye eggs this year? Check out this round up. You can read the post here.
On to our Share It Saturday Features for this week.
We had so many great links posted this week. We went with an Easter Art theme. We LOVE art projects in our house. I can see us doing any of these creative and fun projects. Check out these bloggers. They had some fun with their Easter Art 🙂
Second Chance to Dream shares a bunch of completely cute Easter art projects. Adorable! The Preppy Strawberry created a fun egg carton flower wreath. This looks great on the door 🙂 Gift of Curiosity had fun making crayon resist Easter eggs by painting with water colors. My kids would love this project! Serenity You made quick and easy painted Easter eggs. Simple and perfect! 4 Kids 2 Guinea Pigs created eggs by using paints and bubble wrap for a fun sensory experience. This looks like fun! Fun-A-Day made Easter eggs by using painted handprints. I LOVE this idea! They would be perfect for an Easter card for Grandparents.
This week has been spring break from pre-school and Pre-K for my kiddos. We have been busy playing at home, laying low, starting our Spring Cleaning, going to a couple of parent-teacher conferences, and preparing for Easter.
Bunny Snack Cups…
This is a fun little project that Big Sister helped me with. She was my part sorter, ear counter, and finished-product-liner-upper.
We’ll use these snack cups for our Annual Family Easter Egg hunt.
I love the cute little tails.
Carrot Utensil Wraps…
We’ve done these utensil carrot wraps before for the Easter Egg hunt. These were left over from a previous year.
Easter Snack Tray…
We had a couple of little friends over today for a play date and when snack time rolled around, they LOVED this. Everything was gobbled right up.
Peep Vase…
This was simple project that came together quickly and inexpensively 🙂
The vase is always sitting out in our dining room. Put a drinking glass in the middle and surround with a little grass filler, pack of peeps, and a little more grass.
I’m thinking some tulips would look pretty perfect in there!
We have more to share on our Easter preparations. We’ll share all of the party details after our egg hunt 🙂
This Spring sensory activity doubles as a fine motor activity and visual perceptual skills activity too. We used some materials we had around the house to create an “I Spy” sensory bag that kids can use to work on essential skills for reading and learning.
To make a Spring seek and find sensory bag, you need just a few materials:
gallon sized baggie
gel
food coloring
Paper
Stickers- we used Spring stickers
This is a really simple sensory bag to make:
Today we used some spring flowers that we had and stuck them inside a plastic bag.
We filled it with aloe gel and some food coloring.
There were matching stickers on a piece of paper so the kids had to seek and find the match.
Looking back and forth to find the matches is great for visual scanning and visual memory.
Pushing the gel around to find the sticker below helps with fine motor strength, including index finger isolation.
This was Baby Girl’s version of fun:
…we did not tape the bag to seal it closed, but you may want to. It would also be fun to tape the bag to a window like we did in the linked activity. The gel bag is fun for practicing letter and number formation too.
Why make a Spring Seek and Find Sensory Bag?
Spring is a great time to get outside and explore the natural world with your senses. You can create your own spring sensory bags by filling them with different materials that will stimulate your senses, such as flower petals, leaves, or even some freshly cut grass.
These sensory bags can be a great way to encourage children to explore their surroundings and discover new things. You could also create a seek and find spring activity, where children have to search for certain items using their senses.
If you have a child who is a sensory seeker, creating a spring sensory bag could be a great way to provide them with the tactile and visual sensory input they crave.
The different textures of the materials inside the bag can help to regulate their sensory system and provide a calming effect. Pressing the bag through the fingers offers calming proprioceptive input through the joints of the hands.
Additionally, creating a spring look and find activity could be a fun way to engage them and provide them with an opportunity to explore their surroundings in a meaningful way.
Spring Sensory Bags
For an I spy sensory bag activity, you could fill a bag with various small objects, such as buttons or beads, and have children search for specific items using their senses.
This activity can be a fun way to develop children’s sensory skills and provide them with a fun and engaging learning experience.
Whether you’re looking to engage your senses or seek out new spring adventures, there are plenty of creative ways to make the most of this vibrant season. So why not grab a seek bag and get started today?
Spring Fine Motor Kit
Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!
Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:
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.
Before we get to the fun stuff, we wanted to share a bit about our week…
Big Sister has been decorating the house as we prepare for Easter:
We’ve been playing with these little cuties. A LOT.
Post to come soon.
I made a batch of these Baby Chick sugar cookies.
Our Most popular post of the week was our Rainbow Round-Up. If you missed this post, you can check it out here.
Mama to 4 Blessings created a bug themed watercolor and print art. This looks like fun for all ages.
Buggy and Buddy was inspired by a trip to the museum to make their own Henri Matisse type of artwork. They even made their own painted paper!
Making Boys Men made their own molds and used Plaster of Paris to create sculptures. These look like they were so much fun to paint!
The Sweeter Side of Mommyhood shares several of the current painting projects going on with her students. My daughter especially loved the picture of the birch tree paintings: “Woooow, that’s pretty!”
Buggy and Buddy also shares the giant spring flower wall art. These pretty flowers really brighten up a room 🙂
Night Owl Crawler shows us a super cute handprint birthday card. Wouldn’t this be perfect for gifting to the Grandparents, Aunts/Uncles, cousins…??? I love this!
This was a craft we did on the First Day of Spring. It was a sunny day, but really cold and windy out. So, we brought a little bit of tulips and spring time fun indoors!
Remember our Painting Rainbows craft? We used the painted egg carton and made some tulips.
Baby Girl watched her Big Sister make this and wanted to help with the gluing part.
We used some green crafting sticks and pushed them into another egg carton so the tulips would stand.
We used some paper grass (this is the stuff you put into gift bags…found at a yard sale last summer in a free bin! Awesomeness!)
Glue the paper grass onto the egg carton, and you get a fun spring tulip table centerpiece.
((when you have the kids who pull the whole table cloth off of the table at least once a day…Baby Girl…cough, cough…you need NON-breakable, NON-expensive table centerpieces!))
I found some cute tulip placemats at the dollar store yesterday. I will take a pic and show the whole table set-up soon!
These little cuties were made out of a cake pop kit that I bought over Christmas but never got a chance to make. They would have made cute little snowmen…but I had other plans:)
I made the cake according to the instructions on the kit.
All you have to do is make one chocolate cake, bake it according to the instructions on the box and let it cool.
Once it is cool, break it up and mix with frosting until it is easy to mold into balls.
I decided to add a few chocolate chips…yummy!
Roll these little babies into one inch balls and place in the freezer for 20 minutes.
Take them out of the freezer and dip in melted white chocolate. I was amazed at how fast they harden. I decorated them with the icing that came with the snowmen kit. Easy as that!
So, just because it came out of a box doesn’t mean it can’t be original. I love buying something and tweaking it just a little to make it my own!
These rainbow binoculars is a rainbow craft that we made years ago. However, the binocular craft can be a great way to help kids develop many skills including scissor skills, bilateral coordination, visual scanning, form constancy, visual convergence, visual tracking, and other visual processing skill areas. Add this to your therapy tool box. Be sure to check out all of our rainbow activities for more ways to play and learn with the colors of the rainbow.
Rainbow Binoculars
This was a fun craft we made for a MOMs Club playdate. A fellow mom offered up her stash of toilet paper tubes and this is what I came up with.
We got busy…
searchingforRainbowswithourRainbowBinoculars!
(Or, as little guy said, he had to go look for Tick Tock crock.)
This is what it started out as.
Big Sister helped me make a set of Rainbow Binoculars for our friends to copy at the playdate.
Use two toilet paper tubes, glue strips of colored paper around, and tape together. Attach with yarn for handy access during Rainbow Expeditions.
Cousins during our weekend-cousin-sleep-over had fun searching for rainbows, too.
Tick Tock Crock has been spotted and sent to the hot, hot lava*
🙂
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.
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.
Another week has come and gone and here we are again with a wonderful collection of activities to keep us going! Thank you to everyone who linked up last week, we truly enjoy reading each and every one of your posts.
There has been a lot going on over the last week including two cousin sleep-overs! One nice thing about us sisters living so close to each other is we can have long weekend sleepovers for the cousins while us moms and dads get to go away:)
We had some major fun entertaining 5 kiddos last weekend…
Here are some of the fun activities pictured below that we did to keep everyone happy and playing together:
Grocery Store/Work: this involved pulling out our play cash registers and play computers. The older kids pretended they were working on their computers…oh, how innocent, to want to do “work”:)
Watercolors: We had a great time painting with watercolors on all different color of construction paper. We cut the paper into egg shapes and turned them into beautiful Easter Eggs that are hung on the kitchen window.
Couch cushion slides: The kids pulled all of the cushions off of the couch and made one long slide with pillows at the bottom. This is an activity that keeps them busy for hours! (And, is a good reminder that I need to vacuum the couch).
Indoor car racing: This one was a favorite for the babies. We have two very similar ride on toys that these little ones flew across the floor on alllll day long. They would have races back and forth across the entire length of the living room. It was so cute!
In celebration of a week of creative ideas and as we look forward to another week of great link-ups, let’s get to Share It Saturday!
We chose our featured posts this week based on getting outside for sensory and gross motor Outdoor Play. We love playing outside year-round, but are really looking forward to warmer weather around here! This is a little inspiration board of some great, creative, and FUN Outdoor play ideas. I love how each of these bloggers shared gross motor or sensory play…Outside!
Life With Moore Babies painted trees with chalk paints. This is awesome gross motor play and sounds so fun! Gift of Curiosity shares their gross motor shapes activity. I LOVE the motor planning, and learning going on here. Fun-A-Day got messy playing outside with trains. This is super sensory fun. The Active Mum played outside in some puddles. There is nothing simpler…or more fun than that! My Nearest and Dearest created a Nature Table to explore nature’s finest. Take a hike outside for the gross motor work, and then explore with the senses. Perfect!
