Looking to get kids moving and building skills in therapy sessions or at home? These color exercises use all the colors of the rainbow to help kids move and strengthen gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and even visual motor skills! Add these whole body exercises use colors as a therapy theme, but I love that the colorful exercise activities get kids strengthening muscle groups in big and small ways.

This therapy activity slide deck is one of the many free slides available here on the site, as a resource for teletherapy, home programs, and therapy planning!

Be sure to grab the free I Spy Colors therapy slide deck, too. For a hands-on activity, be sure to use our color by letter worksheet.

Related resource- Working with kids in teletherapy? Need streamlined info on how to structure your sessions? Need activities for week-to-week therapy planning? need answers for all of your teletherapy questions? Join the free teletherapy course, a 5 day email series on telehealth for occupational therapists.

Color exercises

This is a color learning activity, that can be used in teletherapy sessions to develop many skill areas:

Gross Motor Color Exercises

All of these gross motor skill areas can be addressed using the color activities in this slide deck:

• Gross motor skills
• Core strength
• Bilateral coordination
• Crossing midline
• Core strength
• Stability
• Balance and equilibrium skills
• Coordination
• Range of motion
• Flexibility
• Motor planning
• Crossing midline
• Movement patterns
• Posture and postural control
• Muscle tone
• Proprioceptive input
• Vestibular input

As kids go through the slides, they need to complete various stretches, challenging the skills listed above. There are movement patterns, crossing midline activities, yoga positions, and more. Kids can go through these slides several times if you like, to work on motor planning, sequencing, and memory skills.

Then, the slides ask the child to air write letters. This is an eye-hand coordination activity that incorporates shoulder positioning and strengthening, finger isolation, and crossing midline, motor planning, range of motion.

These slides also work on visual perceptual skills including visual closure as kids identify the hidden letter.

Grade and extend this activity:

• Challenge kids by calling out a color and they can complete that gross motor activity.

• Having the child air write the letter associated with the color and writing the letter larger or smaller, using whole arm motions, or just the finger.

• Challenge kids by calling out a color and asking them to air write the letter.

• Or ask kids to complete the air writing task while in the gross motor stretch activity.

Fine Motor Color Exercises

This slide deck challenges fine motor skills as well. Kids can use their finger and work on finger isolation as they write the letters on each of the color slides.

There is another movement section of the slide deck that incorporates colored letters with a fine motor activity. All students will need is a piece of paper (scratch paper works, so tell them to grab an old homework page or even a piece of junk mail) and their hands.

Following the directions on the fine motor activity slides, they will tear the paper into small pieces using their hands to tear and crumble. Tearing paper with the hands and using the finger tips to crumble small bits of paper strengthens the intrinsic muscles of the hands. Here is more information on tearing paper as a fine motor activity.

This activity works on fine motor skills:

• Arch development
• Intrinsic hand strength
• Open thumb web space
• Hand strength
• Dexterity
• Precision
• Graded tearing- eye hand coordination
• Separation of the sides of the hand

Then, you can extend this activity to use it in different ways or to challenge kids of all levels and ages:

• Use different colored paper to match with different letter activities and gross motor exercises in the first part of the slide deck.
• Use different grades of paper to make the exercise more difficult. Heavy weight paper like construction paper, cardstock, or paper plates is more of a challenge and lighter weight paper like thing paper, wrapping paper, wax paper, or tissue paper is easier.
• Encourage children to use only the very tips of one hand.
• Ask kids to write a letter on the small piece of paper and then crumble it up so the letter is hidden.

Visual Motor Exercise with Colors

Finally, the last part of this slide deck is a visual motor exercise. Children can use those small pieces of paper to copy the lines and letters on the slides.

This activity includes strait lines for younger children to incorporate pre-writing lines. There are also letters included for kids working on forming letters.

Extend this activity

• Matching letters to the exercises at the beginning of the deck.
• Kids could also form letters using the paper balls by memory rather than copying the letter forms.

The slide deck ends with a color self regulation exercise. Kids can choose the color that matches their feelings, alert state, and regulation needs, all with a rainbow color theme!

Virtual Color Exercise Activities

Want this free therapy slide deck? Enter your email into the form below. Grab the free Google slide deck by entering your email into the form below. You will receive a PDF containing a link to open the slide deck. Be sure you are logged into your Google account before clicking the button on that PDF. Save the PDF in your therapy files so you can access this resource any time and share with those on your caseload.

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.