crafts

Having a snowflake party? Or maybe just doing a few snowflake activities in your therapy sessions or classroom and want to hit on fine motor skills with a winter theme? You’re in luck! We’ve got a fun pipe cleaner and bead snowflake activity along with a few snowflake crafts, pipe cleaner snowflakes, craft stick snowflakes, and more!

pipe cleaner and bead snowflakes

We’ll start off the snowflake activities with our favorite…pipe cleaner and bead snowflakes. This is one of the best fine motor activities during the winter months for several reasons: it uses items you likely have on hand, and you can target a variety of skills and needs with a single craft.

This fine motor winter activity is a great addition to a winter classroom door decoration, too. Pair it with our My Snow Globe worksheet for a winter handwriting activity.

To thread beads onto a pipe cleaner, you’ll need several underlying skills, making this a great occupational therapy craft during the winter months.

Some of those skills include:

• Pincer grasp– grasping the pony bead with the tips of the fingers
• Open thumb web space– holding the bead with the tips of the finger in order to press it onto the pipe cleaner
• Bilateral coordination– coordinating the motor skills between the bead hand and the pipe cleaner hand. Here are more Winter Bilateral Coordination Activities to target this skill.
• Eye-hand coordination– You can coordinate visual motor skills by asking the child to create symmetrical designs or copy patterns.

Making pipe cleaner and bead snowflakes can also be a great Indoor Recess Ideas for the winter months, too.

Materials:

To make the pipe cleaner and bead snowflakes, simply place your materials on a table.

1. Blue or white pipe cleaners
2. Beads in wintery colors: blues, greys, greens, and white

Then, start making the pipe cleaner bead snowflakes:

1. Twist pipe cleaners together to create an 8 sided snowflake.
2. Add beads to each “stem” of the snowflake.
3. When the beads have been added, bend the end of the pipe cleaner so the beads don’t fall off.

Snowflake Sensory Play

Snowflake Crafts

Snowflake Snacks

If you are hanging these pipe cleaner bead snowflakes on a window, you can use a suction cup hanger.

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.

What if you had themed, NO-PREP activities designed to collect data and can help kids build essential fine motor skills?

Take back your time and start the year off with a bang with these done-for-you fine motor plans to help kids form stronger hands with our Winter Fine Motor Kit. This print-and-go winter fine motor kit includes no-prep fine motor activities to help kids develop functional grasp, dexterity, strength, and endurance. Use fun, winter-themed, fine motor activities so you can help children develop strong fine motor skills in a digital world. 

The Winter Fine Motor Kit includes reproducible activity pages include: pencil control strips, scissor skills strips, simple and complex cutting shapes, lacing cards, toothpick precision art, crumble hand strengthening crafts, memory cards, coloring activities, and so much more.

These winter bird crafts are fun winter crafts that support fine motor skills with all things winter birds. We love these as preschool bird crafts because they support skill development, are are great for the winter months when you see cardinals, blue jays, and even a robin or two as winter comes to an end. Kids love these bird ideas, and you will to!

Winter Bird Crafts

Occupational therapy practitioners love crafts for kids because of the skill development that happens with cutting, gluing, and creating. It’s easy to foster skill achievement by adapting or modifying a craft while supporting finger and hand strength, tactile sensory input, scissor skills, and more.

Some of the skills that you can target using our bird craft ideas support occupational therapy goal areas, including:

• fine motor skills
• improving scissor skills
• visual motor skills
• providing sensory input like heavy work through the hands
• executive functioning skills

Here are more winter fine motor activities to build hand strength, dexterity, motor coordination skills, and more.

Bird Ideas for Therapy

Winter Birds of a feather craft together.  These bird crafts and activities are sure to keep the kids having fun this winter. We loved this week’s round up of features and added a few extra bird ideas for winter bird fun and play.

Let’s get to the bird craft ideas!

Blue Jay Painting activity- One of our favorite bird crafts is our Blue Jay Craft. This is a great fine motor strength activity because we use a cotton swab to paint in details of the blue jay’s feathers. OT practitioners love to use cotton swab painting because it’s a powerful hand strengthening activity that supports arch development.

Robin craft- One great fine motor activity is our robin egg carton craft. You might see robins throughout the winter and as winter months come to an end. This robin activity is nice because it’s a fun pincer grasp activity for kids.

Bird Play Dough Activity- We have a great, free bird play dough mat available here on The OT Toolbox. You can use it along with this B is for Birds and Beans Play Dough activity from My Bright Butterfly- perfect for winter-time indoor play.

Owl Crafts for Kids- We have some great owl activities here on the website, and these winter birds offer crafts, activities, and games that kids love. Some activities include our free Owl Directed Drawing worksheet and owl brain breaks. These Owl Finger Puppet from Crafts On Sea are another great addition to an owl theme.

Fine Motor Angry Birds- Building coordination and hand strength is fun with an Angry Birds theme. WE love how Therapy Fun Zone made Catapult Birds using craft pom poms and bird flashcards. I LOVE this activity for fine motor play!

Felt Bird Craft- We love this Felt Bird Ornament craft from Red Ted Art. While the sewing craft is great for older kids, you can grade the activity down by cutting pieces of felt and gluing the pieces together.

Bird Puppets- Making puppets with kids is a nice fine motor craft for preschoolers. These Silly Bird Puppets from Housing a Forest hit the mark.

Cheerio Bird Feeder- This winter bird feeder craft is perfect for the winter months. Plus, when kids thread cereal loops onto a pipe cleaner, they are building skills in bilateral coordination, precision, and eye-hand coordination. These Cheerio Bird Feeders from Happy Hooligans are an easy bird craft for kids.

Cardinal Craft- Cardinals and red birds are often seen during the winter months. This Redbird Craft from Craftulate is an easy winter craft for children working on scissor skills.

Winter Bird Crafts and Activities

What other ways can you create crafts with winter birds? These ideas can hopefully get you started!

For more winter fun, check out:

What if you had themed, NO-PREP activities designed to collect data and can help kids build essential fine motor skills?

Take back your time and start the year off with a bang with these done-for-you fine motor plans to help kids form stronger hands with our Winter Fine Motor Kit. This print-and-go winter fine motor kit includes no-prep fine motor activities to help kids develop functional grasp, dexterity, strength, and endurance. Use fun, winter-themed, fine motor activities so you can help children develop strong fine motor skills in a digital world. 

The Winter Fine Motor Kit includes reproducible activity pages include: pencil control strips, scissor skills strips, simple and complex cutting shapes, lacing cards, toothpick precision art, crumble hand strengthening crafts, memory cards, coloring activities, and so much 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.

This blog on about how to make a Thanksgiving tree was originally published 11-13-2012 and was updated 11-9-2023.

Today we have a Thanksgiving occupational therapy activity that kids and adults love…a Thanksgiving Tree! This gratitude activity is a powerful and meaningful way to express thanks and gratitude this time of year.

What is a Thanksgiving Tree?

A Thanksgiving tree is a creative and interactive way to express gratitude and celebrate the spirit of Thanksgiving. It typically involves a visual representation of a tree where individuals can attach leaves or notes expressing what they are thankful for.

The Thanksgiving tree serves as a visual representation of collective gratitude, creating a positive and uplifting atmosphere within the classroom or therapy clinic…and it’s an occupational therapy craft that builds skills, too.

A Thanksgiving tree can be set up in the home, school classroom, or public space such as a therapy clinic. This is a great way to build skills with OT, ST, or PT clients with a group activity.

In a therapy clinic setting, a Thanksgiving tree can be a meaningful and therapeutic activity because all clients and therapy employees can help to decorate the Thanksgiving tree with their own thoughts of gratitude.

How to Make a Thanksgiving Tree

You’ll want to start by creating the tree, and this can be a group activity , or you can set up the tree base and then students and clients can decorate the tree. You can do this in several different ways:

• Use a branch collected from outside (this is how we made our Thanksgiving tree shown in the images below). You can tape paper leaves right to the branch.
• Use posterboard or construction paper to create a tree outline on the wall. With this option, you can use sticky tack to attach gratitude leaves to the wall.
• Use a Christmas tree that isn’t yet decorated for the Christmas holiday. Attach paper leaves using string.

Gratitude Leaves

Next, create the gratitude leaves, made from construction paper. Or, you could use the gratitude leaf template we have inside the OT Toolbox Membership club under Thanksgiving Therapy Theme.

1. Provide cut-out leaves or paper shapes for individuals to write or draw their expressions of gratitude. Or, you can ask the students to cut out their leaf shapes if you are working on scissor skills.
2. Students can write a word or sentence right onto the paper.
3. Add lines using a (Amazon affiliate link) LegiLiner.

The leaves can be made from colorful construction paper to embrace the Thanksgiving season by incorporating autumn colors. Or, just use markers to write on printer paper.

You can even use the same leaves to create a gratitude leaf garland to show thankfulness this time of year.

Classroom Gratitude Tree

This could be a great classroom activity for all of the students in a classroom to do as a group. The paper leaves can be used as a handwriting prompt for older students or a Thanksgiving handwriting center for younger students.

Students can hang their own leaf on the tree as part of the exercise.

This can include things like personal achievements, positive experiences, or the support they’ve received.

Thanksgiving Group Activity:

Make the classroom Thanksgiving tree a group activity where students and even other classrooms can collaboratively contribute to the Thanksgiving tree. This fosters a sense of community and shared positivity.

In the therapy setting, a thanksgiving tree can support therapeutic goals, too. Connect the activity to therapeutic goals. For example, it can be linked to building positive affirmations, reinforcing coping strategies, or acknowledging personal growth.

Thanksgiving Tree Mindfulness Activity

You can use a Thanksgiving tree as a Thanksgiving mindfulness exercise, too. The activity allows students to engage in a mindful moment as they focus on what they are thankful for. This can be particularly beneficial in promoting a growth mindset.

We know the benefits of mindfulness and how expressing gratitude can support students in the classroom or kiddos receiving therapy services.

To extend the activity, pair the gratitude leaves with a Thanksgiving mindfulness activity, our deep breathing turkey visual prompt.

Simple Thanksgiving Tree

We have a tradition of making a Thanksgiving Tree this time of year.  It is one of my favorite things about this season.

Thanksgiving Tree

 

 

…And Zebras, Phones, and Annie the year before 🙂

 

 

We tape the leaves on the stick and prop it up in a centerpiece to enjoy all season long.  They love to look at it during meals and say “What does that brown one say, Mom”, or “Does this one say cousins?”

 

 

Some of the cute ones this year…“God and Jesus”, “the mall”, “mac and cheese”, and Little Guy was sure to express his gratitude for “mustard”.

If you are looking for more Thanksgiving activities to do along with your Thanksgiving tree, be sure to grab a copy of the Thanksgiving Fine Motor Kit.

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.