Recently, I was looking into new ways to challenge fine motor skills for my clients – especially ones that did not require purchasing new materials. I wanted something that could challenge scissors use, problem solving, sequencing, attention, and could be used in prep for ADL skills, like buttoning. Then, it came to me: weaving!
Weaving Projects for Kids
Weaving projects and craft are so simple, yet so effective – even the clients that I thought would be frustrated by this old-school craft were super proud of their work. Weaving is something you can do in many different ways, typically dependent on skill level and desired outcomes.
Since we are talking about buttoning skills, I am offering two different options: an advanced one for the kiddos that are almost ready to button independently, and a beginner version for those who are not quite ready to button yet. I hope you adapt these crafts as needed to meet the “just-right” challenge!
Related: Feathers and Burlap Weaving activity that builds bilateral coordination, eye-hand coordination, pinch, grip, and dexterity.
Complex Weaving Instructions
With two pieces of paper of different colors, cut strips of any thickness or length you’d like – just make sure you have an even number. The thinner and longer you cut them, the bigger the challenge. I like to use two different colors to make the task easier to understand and add visual interest.
Cut holes for threading. Half of your strips (or all of one color) need holes for threading. Have your kiddos figure out how big the cuts need to be in order to fit the other strips of paper through.
Fold the paper in order to cut two holes, side by side, throughout the strip of paper. This will be where you weave the other strips of paper through.
Begin Weaving.
Weave the remaining strips of paper (the ones without the holes) into the paper with the holes, making a basket-weave pattern.
Here is where those buttoning skills come into play! The practice of moving the strip of paper through one hole and up and over through the next hole mimics the actions of buttoning and unbuttoning.
If you are creating a specific craft, here is where you can make the weaved pattern into your kids’ desired shape! If you are unsure what you could offer, see the examples below.
Draw the desired object on top of the weaved pattern OR use simple print out to guide the scissors.
Cut the object out.
Add extra paper or decorative objects with glue to seal the edges if you’d like!
Does this sound a bit too challenging for one of your kids? You can lower the difficulty in a few different ways, but below is one idea that is particularly useful if your child demonstrates difficulty with visual motor or perception skills that are required for buttoning.
Simple Weaving Instructions
With two pieces of paper of different colors: a. Cut multiple, 1-inch thick straight lines to the edge of one piece of paper, leaving about an inch uncut on one edge to “hold” all the strips together. b. Cut 1-inch strips of the other piece of paper.
Simply overlap the loose strips of paper onto the other cut paper, every other to make a checkerboard pattern.
Maybe add a gluing or stapling component to challenge them in a different way!
Weaving Projects for kids
I know that it’s so much easier to motivate kids to complete a craft or activity if it is related to a season, holiday, or something that they are personally interested in. That’s one reason why I love weaving crafts – they are so simple at their base, that they can truly be used for anything!
Fall Weaving Crafts- Plaid shirts, apple baskets, spider webs, or hay bales. Winter Weaving Crafts- Sweaters, holiday gifts, Christmas Stockings, or candy canes Spring Weaving Crafts- Easter baskets, Spring dresses, umbrellas, or raincoats Summer Weaving Crafts- Picnic blankets, picnic baskets, or beach towels.
Or for the sporty kiddos in your life, make basketball hoops, soccer goals, tennis rackets, or hockey goalie helmets! The possibilities with weaving projects really are endless.
Here are some additional weaving and buttoning crafts to get the ball rolling!
Sydney Thorson, OTR/L, is a new occupational therapist working in school-based therapy. Her background is in Human Development and Family Studies, and she is passionate about providing individualized and meaningful treatment for each child and their family. Sydney is also a children’s author and illustrator and is always working on new and exciting projects.
Today I have another exciting resource…all about how to teach coloring skills to kids. This is an important developmental skill for kids, and you’ll want to check out our resource on color recognition skills in kids. So often, children do not have the exposure to crayons and paper that is needed for development of fine motor skills or visual motor skills. Teaching coloring skills is just not something parents think about in many cases! Let’s break down coloring skills by age and address specific tips to teach coloring to children.
Coloring is such an important part of childhood and growing up. There are many benefits to coloring as a tool for building skills. Coloring develops hand strength, visual perceptual skills, and precision skills in grasp. It’s the first time many of us express creativity and produce something we are proud of. It boosts confidence, develops understanding of cause and effect, and increases attention spans.
Coloring is also an important stage of child development, too.
Let’s go into age-appropriate specifics on how to teach coloring skills at each age and stage, from babies, to toddlers, to preschool, to Pre-K, to elementary aged children. Specifically, you’ll want to use age-appropriate crayons for toddlers, based on developmental levels.
How to teach coloring skills
Coloring can be hard for kids. Many times, you see kids that refuse to color. Other times you come across kids that prefer markers over crayons. There are reasons for these difficulties, that make sense developmentally. Let’s take a look at the reasons why kids hate to color.
Coloring is HARD!
It hurts the child’s hands to color
Coloring makes the child’s hands tired
Child prefers markers over crayons
Coloring in the lines is hard
It’s hard to finish a coloring page
All of these reasons why kids hate to color are related…and many times, it comes back to a need for developing hand strength and underlying skills.
Skills needed for coloring
There are several areas, or underlying skills that play an important role in coloring:
Arch development (for endurance to color in the object)
Hand strength to move the crayon against a resistive surface
Pinch and grip
Precision to move the crayon with the fingers instead of the whole arm/wrist
Line awareness/visual perceptual skills
Eye-hand coordination
Pencil grasp (to hold the crayon)
Previous experience with fine motor activities/fine motor skill development
Fine motor skills and coloring- In order to hold a crayon, children need to develop fine motor skills. In order to color in a shape, hand strength is needed. In order to color within the lines, visual motor skills are needed. In order to color a whole shape or figure, distal mobility is needed.
Activities to develop these skills include fine motor play, beading, tweezer use, working on a vertical surface can develop these skills.
Line awareness and coloring– Another aspect of coloring is the line awareness to color within the lines. And, before a child can form letters with ease and fluency, they need to achieve pre-writing lines such as strait lines, squares, triangles, X and diagonals. This resource on line awareness can be a great starting point on this visual perceptual skills needed to color within the lines. Also try these tips to work on line awareness needed for coloring.
Pencil grasp and coloring– In order to teach coloring skills, it is important to progress through the stages listed below, whether at age level or not. Just like the underlying skills needed for pencil grasp development or handwriting, the basic levels need to be achieved. Before a child can hold a pencil with a functional grasp, they need to progress through more primitive grasp patterns such as a pincer grasp, palmer supinate grasp, digital pronate grasp, and quadrupod or static tripod grasp.
All of these underlying skills play an important role in how to teach coloring skills to kids!
Coloring Skills By Age
In this post we will break down the coloring skills you can expect a child to do dependent on age. You will see that we break them down into age ranges – for good reason, too. Every child will develop different skills and different times. Generally, though, there is a developmental path that the majority of children will follow.
If you believe that your child is lagging behind in these skills, talk to your child’s health care team and let them know what you see in your child. They will direct you towards occupational therapy if it is right for your family!
Coloring Skills at BIRTH – 6 MONTHS
Not much coloring going on in this time frame, as you may imagine! Instead, your little one is prepping those little fingers to hold and manipulate objects, that will one day lead to purposeful scribbling!
I always recommend allowing your child to explore coloring as soon as they are able to hold a crayon in their hand and sit up safely in a high chair. Be sure to stay with your baby the whole time you are offering coloring opportunities, as they will likely put their crayons in their mouth.
Support the development of Coloring Skills during infancy:
Babies under six months will typically grasp a small object in the middle or pinky-side of their palm. This grasp pattern is strengthening the building blocks for more refined grasps down the road. Tummy time is a great tool for lengthening the ulnar side of the hand for strengthening so that endurance in fine motor tasks is achievable at older ages. Tummy time also supports arch development even at this young age.
While most parents of new babies will not be thinking of coloring, these activities support the development of MANY motor and cognitive skills, and not just coloring!
Coloring Skills before 1 year
From 6 months to 12 months, babies are certainly not coloring. However, they ARE developing motor and visual skills needed for holding and marking with a crayon in the later years.
Grasping patterns grow a lot during this time! Your baby will start to use their thumbs a little bit more while stacking blocks, be able to pick up their Cheerios with only their thumb and pointer finger (pincer grasp), and can point to objects with one finger. By 12 months old, we should see a pincer grasp while holding small objects. This grasp prepares little fingers for sustained coloring!
Support the development of Coloring Skills during In babies:
Around a year old, your little one may show more interest in scribbling. They will likely make large marks across the paper (and hopefully not the walls!) by using their whole arm to move their crayon. As they develop, you will see that those big movements will get smaller and smaller as fine motor skills are refined.
Grasp: On a coloring utensil, they will use a gross grasp that looks like a fist.
Coloring Skills for Toddlers
The toddler years, for from 12 months to 2 years, is a great window to introduce coloring. It’s during this age that toddlers show interest in coloring and develop skills needed for motor development. This is a great time to explore how to teach coloring skills at an impressionable age!
During the 12 month to two year range, toddlers are building proficiency in coloring skills…and this is a great time to teach coloring!
In this time frame, your toddler will begin to recognize colors and shapes in their environment, and may purposefully choose colors while they are scribbling on paper. They will start to hold their crayon or marker a little more gently, with their pinky down towards the paper, and all fingers wrapped around.
Teach Toddlers to Color:
During the toddler years, exposure is key! You can present many activities and coloring opportunities to color with crayons. Different types of crayons and coloring activities are great exposure, too. Here are tips to teach toddlers to color:
Offer just one crayon at first. Offering too many options can overwhelm the young child.
Try different crayon types. There are different crayon molds that are great for toddlers including egg shaped crayons, rock shaped crayons, or even bath crayons.
Try coloring materials that require less hand strength or resistance, to make a mark. Kwik Stick tempera paints are a great option.
Show toddlers how to color. Color alongside young children for an opportunity to connect with the child and interact. Toddlers love to mimic others and can learn a lot by watching their parent color alongside them.
Offer toddler-friendly coloring pages. A big coloring book with many details can overwhelm a child. Try a printed page with simple shapes in smaller sizes.
Don’t expect perfection. Just putting crayons to the page is a great learning experience that builds hand strength, eye-hand coordination, and coloring experience.
Expect whole-arm movements. Toddlers color with their shoulder and elbow movements, or the proximal movements and won’t color with precise movements of the fingers until an older age. This is normal and to be expected. Coloring for toddlers looks like scribbling and that’s OK!
Encourage coloring and mark-making with coloring games and toys. This post has games and toys for coloring that Toddlers will love.
Work on fine motor hand skills through games involving tweezers, games on the floor, gross motor play, and whole body play activities.
Encourage play with age-appropriate puzzles and blocks.
Your child may start to show more interest in coloring just like you do, trying to copy your marks and paying closer attention to where they are placing their pen to paper. They should be able to copy a vertical line by around age two – this is a key marker for pre-writing skills. Usually around this time they also choose a preferred hand dominance while coloring!
The typical grasp pattern used by toddlers is the Palmar supinate grasp. This is a normal part of development.
Coloring Skills for Preschool (2-3 years)
The early preschool years, or 2- 3 years of age are a prime range for developing beginning coloring skills.
Your young preschool child will start to shift their fingers towards the paper while they hold their coloring utensil by age three. Some children hold their pencil towards the top near the eraser during this stage of development. They should naturally work their fingers down the utensil, closer to the paper, as they get used to this new grasp.
Use these strategies to teach young preschoolers to color:
During the 2-3 year period, you can expect your child to start drawing meaningful images. They will point to a drawing that may look like nothing to you, but then they will tell you that it’s their dog! By age three, your child should be able to do the next pre-writing task: copy a horizontal line and a circle.
Teach Preschoolers to Color (2-3 years old):
For young preschoolers, continued exposure to coloring is necessary. So often, young children skip the needed PLAY that builds fine and gross motor skills. With more and more young children playing primarily on screens versus free play, independent play, and creative fine motor play that builds the necessary hand strength, mobility, dexterity needed for precision, endurance, and progression through typical grasp patterns. Children at the preschool stages need fine motor play, much less screen time exposure, and play experiences.
Another pet peeve of pediatric occupational therapists is the tendency to hand a young child a pencil or pen during the preschool years.
Continue with the suggestions listed above for the baby stage.
Don’t be afraid to use broken crayons. Sounds strange, right? Sometimes a whole crayon is too big for small hands. A broken crayon can be the “just right” size and can be used as a strengthening tool for fine motor skills as well.
Don’t expect perfection. Crayon lines will go over the border of the coloring area and that’s ok!
Offer small coloring spaces with wider borders.
Provide simple shapes for coloring opportunities.
Offer physical boundaries if needed: Use wikki sticks around the coloring area, use your hands to create a small coloring space.
Color small areas on an easel to engage the core as a stabilizer, work against gravity, to place the wrist into extension, to pull the fingers into a tripod type of grasp for dexterity.
Continue easel work and play with lite brite, painting on easels, sticking and peeling tape to the wall, sticking foam pieces to a wet easel surface.
Play with foam sheets on a window. Try this rainbow play activity where preschoolers can stick foam sheets to a wet window. Encourage use of a spray bottle to wet the window and then wipe with a towel to clean up any drips. (It’s a great way to teach colors to preschoolers, too!)
Draw with chalk on a vertical chalk board or on a driveway/side walk.
Try coloring materials that require less hand strength or resistance, to make a mark. Kwik Stick tempera paints are a great option.
Show toddlers how to color. Color alongside young children for an opportunity to connect with the child and interact. Toddlers love to mimic others and can learn a lot by watching their parent color alongside them.
The typical grasp pattern used by young preschool children in the 2-3 year age range is the Digital pronate grasp. Use of this grasp pattern is a typical stage of grasp development.
Coloring Skills in Preschool (4-5 years)
During the later preschool years, at four and five years of age, preschoolers are developing more refined coloring skills as their motor and visual develop integrate.
Around age four is when you can start to see recognizable images appear more regularly in your child’s artwork. Four-year-olds will usually draw people with two, three, or four body parts. For example, the person may have a circle for a head, a rectangle for the body, and two circles for feet.
By the time they are five, they will likely be drawing people with six or more body parts! You will see their drawings becoming more and more life-like, by adding details like fingers, eye color, and buttons on clothing.
By age four, we expect a child to be able to copy a cross – a very tricky visual motor skill! Around age five, we would expect a child to be able to copy a square and color inside the lines fairly well.
Teach Preschoolers to Color (4-5 years old):
For older preschoolers, especially those in Pre-K, it can be common to see preschools and pre-K classrooms where young children are expected to write letters, write their name, or trace letters. This is potentially damaging for the young child and not recommended by pediatric occupational therapists. This premature exposure to writing with pencils, tracing letters, and writing letters isn’t based on child development of motor skills.
It will result in forming letters incorrectly and establishing poor motor plans for letters. It will result in poor pencil grasps that are difficult to change. It will result in forming letters from the bottom or in “chunks”. It is a detriment to children, especially because there is little time in the kindergarten classroom for working on letter formation, pencil grasp instruction beyond the regular curriculum. So changing motor plans and muscle memory that has been poorly established is detrimental for the young child.
What preschool and Pre-K children at 4 and 5 years of age need is play and the opportunity to develop and refine fine motor skills, hand strength, eye-hand coordination, visual motor skills. These skills are strengthened through play.
Try these strategies to teach older preschoolers/Pre-K children to color:
Use all of the strategies previously listed above.
Encourage coloring with interest-based coloring pages (run a Google search for coloring pages, i.e. “unicorn coloring pages”, “superhero coloring pages”, etc. You can generally find free printable coloring pages in most themes.)
Show off art work! Create a space in the home or clinic where coloring projects can be displayed. This is a great motivator for many children.
Encourage smaller coloring areas to improve eye-hand coordination with line use. A smaller coloring space enables children to use their fingers to move the crayon rather than the wrist, elbow, or shoulder.
Use a smaller or broken crayon to promote a developmentally appropriate quadripod or static tripod grasp.
Use simple shapes with curved lines like circles and ovals to promote smooth coloring lines with minimal direction changes and angles to the coloring picture.
If children are complaining of tired hands or tend to switch crayon colors a lot, it can be a sign of weakness in the hands. To strengthen the hands, encourage play with tweezers, tongs, spray bottles, pinch and grip activities, LEGO blocks, play dough, beading activities, peg boards, etc.
If you have a box of crayons with a crayon sharpener on the back, encourage the child to use it to sharpen crayons. The built-in sharpener is great for not only sharpening dull crayons, but also as a hand strengthening device!
The typical grasp pattern in preschool years for 4-5 year olds is the quadrupod or static tripod grasp. Use of either of these grasps is part of typical grasp development.
Coloring Skills at 5-6 years old
Somewhere between ages five and six, we would expect a child to be able to copy multiple shapes, including the ones they would have mastered in the past (i.e. vertical, horizontal, and crossed lines).
Around age five we would like to see what is called a dynamic tripod grasp when a child is writing or coloring. They should have their pencil between their pointer finger and thumb, with the middle finger supporting and the ring and pinky fingers tucked away into the palm. This grasp is “dynamic” if the fingers can move separately from the palm and wrist, allowing for good control of the writing utensil. This growing strength and control is why we see handwriting and coloring skills develop!
By age six, they should be able to copy more complex shapes, like triangles and rhombuses. You could expect them to independently draw some of the more simple shapes as well, like circles and squares.
The dynamic tripod grasp is the most advanced pencil grasp and should continue throughout their life. Typically, whatever grasp a child has habituated by age 6 is the grasp they will likely continue to have.
Teach kids to color at 5-6 years:
Try these strategies to teach children aged 5-6 years old children to color:
Use all of the strategies listed above under preschool, older preschool, etc.
Highlight the line with a marker. A bright color can be a visual cue of where to write. Letters should rest on the line. You can start with a nice thick and brightly colored highlighter like this one and move to a thinner pen like these ones. Sometimes the visual cue of that bright line is enough to keep letters placed correctly.
Another strategy to work on line awareness in coloring is to add bolder coloring shape lines with more contrast by darkening the borders with a black marker. Simply outline the shape with a black marker for a visual prompt.
For kids that show a great deal of difficulty with coloring in a given space, use a stencil made from a thing cardboard like a recycled cereal box. Cut out a rectangle and place it over the given writing space. This will help to remove distractions of the rest of the page and proved a designated space to color within.
Use glue to trace along the outside border of the coloring space. Let the glue dry and then use that tactile border as a physical prompt for coloring lines.
The typical grasp pattern for 5-6 year olds is a tripod/dynamic tripod grasp.
Coloring Skills at SIX YEARS OLD AND BEYOND
Older children can sometimes struggle with coloring and see their peers who seem to have little trouble at all. This can be a stab at their confidence and self-esteem. For older children, coloring often-times is a “sometimes” task in the classroom, so there are limited opportunities for a hands-on fine motor task. Still older students use primarily colored pencils to color in the classroom. Coloring with colored pencils requires even more hand strength, precision, and mobility with the pencil, so this can be a challenge.
Try these strategies for teaching older kids coloring skills:
To teach coloring skills to older children, use all of the methods mentioned under each age level above.
Your elementary-aged child will continue to develop fine motor skills for writing and coloring, as well as manipulating other craft media like clay, papier mache, etc. Creating things with their hands will not only strengthen their muscles but will also benefit their social development, self-esteem, and problem solving skills.
Work on coloring with a variety of crayon types, markers, or paint pens.
Use interest-based coloring books or coloring pages.
A final note on teaching coloring skills
If wondering exactly how to teach coloring skills to children at various ages is something you are looking for developmentally appropriate strategies, this comprehensive resource is for you. Coloring is a child occupation needed for learning, interactive play, and creative play.
Encourage your kids at all stages of development to explore their creativity and the fine motor, visual motor, cognitive and socioemotional skills will follow.
Dosman, C. F., Andrews, D., & Goulden, K. J. (2012). Evidence-based milestone ages as a framework for developmental surveillance. Paediatrics & Child Health,17(10), 561–568. https://doi.org/10.1093/pch/17.10.561
How to Teach Coloring Skills is a collaborative article by Colleen Beck, OTR/L and Sydney Rearick, OTS.
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.
Sydney Thorson, OTR/L, is a new occupational therapist working in school-based therapy. Her background is in Human Development and Family Studies, and she is passionate about providing individualized and meaningful treatment for each child and their family. Sydney is also a children’s author and illustrator and is always working on new and exciting projects.
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.
Looking for Summer activities that kids can do in therapy or at home while building fine motor skills? These suncatcher crafts are designed to do just that. I’ve put together a few sun catcher activities that kids can do this summer to work on dexterity and precision…and brighten up any room! Use these DIY suncatcher activities in occupational therapy interventions or therapy at home and let’s get those fine motor skills working!
These are just one of the many occupational therapy crafts for kids that we have here on the site. Use these suncatcher crafts to build essential skills needed for writing, pencil grasp, functioning, and play!
Suncatcher Crafts Kids will Love
This time of year (and all year long, really) suncatchers make a fun craft for kids to make. They brighten up a room by bringing light and color in. We had to look around the webs for more gorgeous suncatcher crafts and found some beautiful crafts for Summer fun. These suncatchers are not only pretty, they use some different materials to catch the sun’s rays and fill your room with color.
Sun catcher Crafts for Kids
This Faux Stained Glass Suncatcher from Buggy and Buddy is a great way to incorporate ruler skills, bilateral coordination, visual tracking, and other visual perceptual skills into a DIY suncatcher craft. Children can then color in the faux stained glass to work on line awareness and pencil control skills. What a great suncatcher activity for therapy!
This gratitude craft doubles as a Flower Suncatcher. Kids can work on scissor skills, bilateral coordination, motor planning, and even social emotional development. Involve the practice of empathy and mindfulness in kids as they focus on things and people they are thankful for when making this creative suncatcher craft.
This Rainbow Suncatcher from Fireflies and Mudpies is a great fine motor workout. Kids can thread beads onto pipe cleaners and build arch development, pincer grasp, tripod grasp, bilateral coordination, and eye-hand coordination skills. Then melt this DIY rainbow sun catcher into the most colorful window decoration.
This Button and Glue Suncatcher can be a fine motor workout as kids improve pinch, precision, eye-hand coordination, in-hand manipulation, separation of the sides of the hand. It’s a fun craft to use the materials you have in your home but also build fine motor skills!
This Crayon Shaving Suncatchers from Red Ted Art is a powerful fine motor activity. It works on separation of the sides of the hand, tripod grasp, and eye-hand coordination skills. Throw in cutting with scissors and you’ve got a scissor skills craft, too! Then, use those left-over crayon shavings to work on finger isolation like we did in this crayon shaving sensory bag.
These Oil Suncatchers from Meaningful Mama addresses a variety of skills: bilateral coordination, scissor skills, pencil control (using multisensory processes with a cotton swab and oil as the writing medium). What a fun way to work on fine motor skills that results in a beautiful sun catcher craft!
This Christmas Tree Suncatcher craft can be used for any theme or holiday. Use the same premise of picking up small sequins for a neat pincer grasp activity that builds arch strength, precision, and opposition of the fingers.
These Tissue Paper Heart Suncatchers from Fireflies and Mudpies can be a creative way to work on scissor skills. Cutting tissue paper is a challenge for kids because of the thin nature of the paper. But, it’s a great way to work on refinement of fine motor skills. Then add the bilateral coordination, motor planning, and visual figure-ground skill work and you’ve got a therapy craft that will be a hit! Here are more fine motor activities with tissue paper that can be used in OT interventions.
This Nature Collage Suncatchers from Hands on as We Grow can be a fun way to work on eye-hand coordination, grasp development, and visual figure ground skills with kids.
These Salt Dough Suncatchers from Homegrown Friends are a gorgeous sun catcher craft that can add heavy work through the hands, followed by pinch and dexterity grasp work.
Need more ways to build fine motor skills through play?
Grab the Summer Fine Motor Kit to work on precision, dexterity, grasp development, and 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.
These tangram activities are designed to develop visual perceptual skills, visual motor skills, and fine motor skills in kids. Tangrams make a great addition to any occupational therapy treatment bag!
Tangram Activities
Tangrams are a great tool for learning and development. The colorful shapes are perfect for building images and working on math skills such as shape identification and patterning.
Tangrams are also an easy way to incorporate visual perceptual skills, fine motor skills, and visual motor integration into play.
Development of visual perceptual skills is essential for tasks like reading, writing, math, movement, self-care, and many other functional tasks. These tangram activities are perfect to improve visual perception in a playful way. You can use tangrams to address visual perception in many more ways, including ideas to help with handwriting.
And check out these cardboard tangrams for developing visual motor integration skills.
This post contains affiliate links.
Visual perception allows us to take in visual information, process it, and use it to interpret information from our environment. There are many parts of visual perception, but today, I’ve got three visual perceptual skills that can be developed using tangrams.
Visual Percepetion and Tangrams
1. Visual Discrimination allows us to determine similarities and differences based on color, shape, etch. This skill allows us to know that a 6 and a 9 are different and that a p and a q are not the same letter.
Use tangrams to work on visual discrimination:
Place tangram shapes on a piece of paper. Ask the child to locate all of the triangles, all of the squares, etc.
Ask the child to find shapes that are the same even if they are different sizes. This tangram set has several different sizes of triangles, making it a great tool for form constancy.
Use two different shapes to discuss what makes the shapes similar and different.
2. Visual Memory allows us to retain visual information. We need visual memory in order to copy written work.
Use tangrams to work on visual memory:
Use the tangrams for a hands-on game of “Simon”. Place shapes on a piece of paper, taking turns to add one new shape at a time. Each player should recall the previous round before adding a new tangram shape.
Place several tangram shapes on a piece of paper. Allow the child to stare at the shapes for a period of time. Then, cover the shapes with a second piece of paper. Ask the child to recall the shapes that they saw.
3. Form Constancy is the ability to recognize shapes and forms no matter what position they are in.
Use tangrams to work on form constancy:
Use tangrams to build form constancy by positioning shapes in different positions. Ask the child to locate all of the squares, quadrilaterals, etc.
Position shapes on one side of a piece of paper. On the other side of the paper, position shapes that can be combined to make the shape on the first side of the paper. Ask the child to match up the two sides.
Position shapes along one side of a piece of paper. Position matching shapes along the right side of the paper, with the shapes slightly rotated. Ask the child to match up the shapes.
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.
Today I have a fun ice cream writing activity that gets kids excited about writing ice cream words and everything fun and motivating about ice cream. If your kids are anything like mine they love ice cream and the toppings ice cream cones sprinkles and the jingle of the ice cream truck.
Ice Cream Writing
In this ice cream writing activity kids can work on the skills they need for legible handwriting including letter formation sizing spacing and copying skills and the fine motor skills needed for a functional pencil grasp.
All of this happens in an interactive in a free Google slide that you can use in teletherapy face-to-face therapy home programs or in the classroom for with an ice cream theme.
This ice cream writing activity begins with a several ice cream themed words including:
ice cream truck
chocolate syrup
ice cream scoop
cone
sprinkles
spoon
bowl
Ice Cream Writing Skills
Kids can copy the words from the slide deck and work on letter formation, sizing, spacing, and legibility.
You could expand the activity to ask kids to write the words in alphabetical order and address some visual perceptual skills such as visual scanning visual memory visual attention and visual discrimination and others.
Then the slides continue with a visual perceptual exercise that takes away one of the items on the previous slide.
This activity is much like one a hands-on “what’s missing” activity where you lay out several minute items on a table and then ask children to remember what they see in front of them and then after a few seconds you take away one of the items and ask them what’s missing.
“What’s Missing” games are such a great way to work on visual attention and visual memory skills. These skills are so needed for copying materials writing reading and recalling letter formation as well as hand writing rules like using spaces between words in pencil grasp rules.
The slides continue with several of these “what’s missing” activities with the ice cream theme where kids can write out the specific ice cream terms that are missing on each slide in further work on handwriting skills.
Write Ice Cream Words in ABC Order
The next ice cream handwriting activity asks kids to write in alphabetical order, several ice cream words scattered on ice cream cones.
Kids can work on copying those in order and work on the visual memory skills and visual perceptual skills needed for putting words into alphabetical order.
Ice Cream Sign Language Activity
The next several slides include several American Sign Language handwriting activities to spell out ice cream words.
There is an American Sign Language key on each slide so that kids can visually scan to copy the hand formations to spell out the words.
They will love using sign language to spell out ice cream words like sprinkles, scoop, ice cream, bowl, and spoon.
The benefits of asking children to use sign language to spell words is that if they do not know the sign language hand formations, that they need to visually attend to on the screen, using visual memory and visual attention skills to copy the formation.
However using sign language also develops working memory to recall and use the same letters in spelling. American sign language activities and spelling also benefits kids to work on fine motor skills such as:
finger isolation
separation of the sides of the hand
open thumb web space
arch development
dexterity
Ice Cream Writing Prompts
The last activity on this ice cream writing task is a open ended handwriting task which asks students to create sentences using the ice cream words.
You can expand this activity to meet the needs of various levels of children by asking them to copy more sentences or less sentences you can make the sentences very concrete and give them a specific sentence to write that contains the words or you can leave it open ended and ask students to write a silly sentence or a story using the words on the slide.
Use the ice cream writing prompts to meet the needs of your students!
You will also enjoy the other ice cream activities that we have here on the website including:
Would you like to add the slide deck to your therapy Toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below to access this ice cream writing activity.
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 evaporation experiment uses recycled materials to explore evaporation. Kids can use the recycled materials projects as a science science experiment to explore how evaporation works with different sized containers.
Evaporation Experiment
This was SUCH a fun way to explore science with my kids. We talked about water evaporation while engineering a few different water containers and working in a bit of math, too. Getting outside to play is something we do everyday, so this outdoor STEM activity was a perfect way to bring a little bit of learning outdoors on a sunny day.
Evaporation Experiment with Recycled Materials
To complete this science experiment, we used all items from our recycle bin. You’ll need a few items to do this evaporation experiment at home:
Lids from various containers. (We used lids of various sizes to explore how fast water would based on container size. Some lids you’ll want are deep lids, bottle caps, and low lids like one from a play dough canister.) If you have a recycled materials craft bin started, just pull from there.
Other recycled materials to see if we could adjust the lids that were alike.
Tape (This was the only non-recycled material that we used in this science experiment.)
Eye-dropper, small spoon, or a straw to drop water into the cups and containers.
Evaporation Activity for Kids
To set up this evaporation experiment, we worked on a bit of fine motor skills and visual perceptual skills. First we expored each container, lid, and cup to determine which was biggest, smallest, and which we thought would hold more water.
This is a great evaporation activity for preschoolers!
Determining the containers by size allows preschoolers to explore visual perceptual skills and size concepts.
Next, you’ll need to add the same amount of water to each cup or container. There are several ways you can do this: by using an eye dropper, small spoon (like a teaspoon), or the end of a straw. We used a dropper to fill each lid with the same amount of water. Each lid had 10 ml of water.
You can use the end of a straw to drop water drops into the cups. When you use the straw, kids are working on so many fine motor skills. We talked about how to do this (and why using a straw to drop water into the cups) is such an awesome way to build precision and dexterity in this butterfly painting craft.
My preschooler had fun scooping water into the lids and counted the measurements.
We then noticed how we had four containers that were all the same size. The other lids were various sizes.
To the four lids of the same size, we modified the containers slightly to see how the top would affect rate of evaporation. We covered one with foil. Another was covered with plastic wrap and poked with small holes. The third was covered with mesh. The fourth container was left open to the air.
Related: You could take this evaporation experiment further and use ice cubes that then melt and evaporate. Here is information on the motor benefits of scooping ice. The ice cubes would then have to melt to a liquid and then go through the process of evaporating to a gas state.
Evaporation Experiment Predictions
I asked my kids from which lid they thought water would evaporate more quickly.
My preschooler said she thought the smallest lid (the bottle cap) would evaporate first because it was the smallest lid. She thought the play dough lid’s water would evaporate slowest because it was the biggest lid. She hypothesized that of the four containers that were the same size, the open container would evaporate first and the covered container would evaporate last.
I thought her answers were interesting and clearly following Piaget’s conservation theory. In this case, she thought the bottle cap appeared to have more water because it was filled to the brim, where the large and low play dough lid was only slightly covered with water.
My older kiddos had different answers: They thought the play dough lid would evaporate first because it had less “deepness” (or depth). We decided that the sun would shine and evaporate this lid’s water first.
They agreed with my preschooler when they said they thought the uncovered lid would evaporate before the covered lid.
While we made good hypotheses with this experiment, we ran into a bit of bad weather luck following our outdoor science. Our sunny day turned into several days of rain and gloomy skies. We’re still waiting for our water to evaporate and will update this post when we have some results!
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.
These Earth Day Activities are great for occupational therapy activities because they are full of fine motor work, bilateral coordination, motor planning, and sensory experiences. Plus, when kids create these Earth day crafts and play experiences, they are learning about recycling, cleaning up the Earth, and nature.
Earth Day Activities
Let’s get to the Earth Day fun!
Make a recycled materials craft bin. Kids can gather recyclable materials from food containers, cardboard, artwork, and use them to make a DIY craft bin that is used for making more crafts and using in fine motor or sensory play activities. I love that the wax paper sleeves or egg cartons can be easily stored in cut cereal boxes. What a way to work on scissor skills with a variety of materials.
2. Use recycled materials to make a flower craft– Then, after that recycled materials craft bin is sorted, use the items to make a flower craft. Things like used egg cartons, cereal boxes, paper bags, can be cut and manipulated to craft and work on fine motor skills.
3. Head outside. There are so many benefits to playing and exploring the outdoors. And, kids can learn about the earth, too.
4. Read about recycling. These books about recycling are great to incorporate into therapy activities.
5. Incorporate recycled materials into learning concepts. Use these strategies to integrate therapy goals into the classroom with a recycling theme. You’ll find math, reading, science, and more ideas here.
6. Plant something- Explore this post on sensory gardens to find ways to incorporate sensory input in the outdoors.
I was surfing around on some other lovely blogs and trying to find some fun crafts that we could try. Here are a few of our favorite ones we came across all geared towards children ages two through five.
Itsy Bitsy Learners
This is a fun activity for preschoolers using homemade textured paint.
Repeat Crafter Me This Earth Day inspired felt counting book is such a great idea for toddlers.
Imprints From Tricia What a fun idea- go on a nature hunt and create a Nature Book. Press plants, leaves, and flowers into paint and then write to describe the prints. It’s a great sensory based handwriting activity.
Laugh Paint Create Created some great recycled artwork with cardboard food boxes. Work on scissor skills, bilateral coordination, and more.
Teach Beside Me These adorable Rock faces will make anyone smile and make a beautiful addition to a garden.
All of these great posts have inspired us to go create something special out of recycled items or something Mother Earth has provided for us…we can’t wait to get our hands dirty!
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.
Have you ever noticed that small children eat meals with recklessness? Bits of food covers the face, cheeks, hands, lap, floor, belly, and even hair. Part of it is learning to use utensils and manage food on the fork or spoon. But there’s more to messy eating too! Messy eating for a baby or toddler is actually a good thing, and completely normal part of child development. And, letting a small child get messy when they eat, and even playing with their food as they eat is OK!
Messy eating
I’m sure that your mother never told you it was okay to play with your food at the dinner table, but I’m here to tell you otherwise. Playing with food is not only okay, it is vital to development of self feeding skills and positive engagement with food. When young children play with their food they are engaging in a rich, exploratory sensory experience that helps them develop knowledge of texture, taste, smell, changing visual presentation of foods and oral motor development.
When solid foods are introduced to baby, it is often a VERY messy ordeal. There is food on the chair, the bib, the floor, you…everywhere but the baby’s mouth. Often times, parents may feel discouraged or don’t like the mess that is the result, but it is OK. In fact, the messier the better.
Exploring food textures with the hands provides tactile experience to the hands, palm, and individual fingers. Are foods sticky, chunky, goopy, or gooey? All of that exposure to the hands is filed away as exposure to textures.
Picking up and manipulating foods offers fine motor benefits, too. Picking up and manipulating bits of food offers repetition in pincer grasp, graded precision, grasp and release, eye-hand coordination, bilateral coordination, crossing midline, and proprioceptive feedback. All of this is likely presented in a baby seat or high chair that offers support and stability through the trunk and core. When that support is offered to babies and toddlers, they can then work on the distal coordination and dexterity. At first, manipulation of food is very messy as those refined skills are developed, but it’s all “on-the-job training” with tasty benefits!
Research shows that a child moves through a series of exploratory steps before successfully eating new foods. This process involves messy play from the hands, up the arms, onto the head and then into the mouth. The steps of this process cannot happen unless the child is encouraged to touch, examine and play with their food. In today’s culture of sterilization and cleanliness, this often counterintuitive to parents and a hard pattern to break.
Promoting Play with Food
Mealtimes can be rushed affairs, making it hard to play with food, but they are not the only times we engage with food throughout the day.
Cooking and meal prep are two of the most common opportunities for play and engagement with food. These activities present perfect opportunities for parents to talk about color, size, shape, texture, smell and taste of the foods that are being prepared. Use of descriptive words, over exaggeration when talking about and tasting foods, along exploration opportunities develop a positive interest in foods.
Babies can be involved in kitchen prep as they play with appropriate utensils and kitchen items like baby-safe bowls or pots. Toddlers enjoy being involved in the food preparations and can wash, prep, and even chop soft foods with toddler-safe kitchen tools.
Explore these cooking with kids recipes to get small children involved in all the benefits of the kitchen.
Here are more baby play ideas that promote development.
Food Art
Free play with foods like yogurt, jello and applesauce are also great opportunities to promote messy play and creativity. Utilize these foods for finger painting, or painting with other foods as the brushes. This activity challenges tactile and smell regulation, along with constant changes in the visual presentation of the food.
Creativity with Food
When presented with food for free play, or at the dinner table encourage their creativity–carrot sticks become cars or paint brushes, and raisins become ants on a log.
The sillier the presentation, and more engaged the child becomes, the more likely they are to eat the foods you have presented to them. Especially, if these foods are new, or are non-preferred foods. High levels of over exaggeration also leads to increased positive experiences with foods, which in turn leads to happier eaters, and less stressful mealtimes down the road.
Ideas like these flower snacks promote healthy eating and can prompt a child to explore new textures or tastes in a fun, themed creative food set-up.
Messy Eating and Oral Motor Development
Not only does play promote increased sensory regulation and positive engagement with foods, it also promotes oral motor skill development. Oral motor skill development is promoted when a variety of foods are presented and the mastered skills are challenged.
Foods that are long and stick like such as carrots, celery and bell peppers, promote integration of the gag reflex, along with development of the transverse tongue reflex that later supports tongue lateralization for bolus management.
Foods such as peas, or grapes promote oral awareness and regulation for foods that “pop” when bitten, and abilities to manage multiple textures at one time.
Messy Eating and Positive Mealtimes
Whether you have a picky eater, or are just trying to make mealtimes fun, play is the way to go!
Play with food is critical to development of oral motor skills and sensory regulation needed to support positive meal times. Through the use of creative play, exposure, and over exaggeration these milestones can be achieved.
Although the goal is for your child to eat new foods there are many steps we need to conquer before getting there. Don’t worry, these can be fun and stress free!
Let me ask you a question. If you were presented with a new food, something so new and anxiety provoking that you don’t want it near you and you definitely don’t want to touch it; do you think you would want it anywhere near your mouth? About in your mouth? Even more, how about swallowing it? The answer for most would be NO WAY!
Well, we can’t expect the same from our kids. If they don’t want to look at or touch a food, they most definitely will not want to eat it! So before getting kids to put new foods near or in their mouth, we need to take several steps back and learn how to interact with it. This is where the fun can come in!
This week we are going to experiment with various ways of play or interacting with foods. Remember, the goal in not to eat it. The goal is simply to interact with it and hopefully to start getting messy with it! Let’s kid you child comfortable with touching food and have fun doing it. This will not only get them a few steps closer to eating it, but it will also build positive associations with the food and also make them more comfortable with various aspects of it. This can include the color, texture, shape, smell, etc. The more foods we play with, the more of these they are feeling comfortable with. So in short, let’s start our food journey with our hands and our eyes by getting messy!
Today’s free therapy slide deck has a bug fine motor activities theme for creepy crawly fine motor fun. The bugs and insects activities in this virtual therapy slides will get those hands moving and building coordination, dexterity, and motor planning skills. Just in time for Spring bugs, this is just one of the many free slides we have on the site.
We recently released this bug emotions slide deck to help with social emotional skills, so if you are wanting to create a bug theme in therapy, today’s fine motor slide deck is the perfect addition.
I created this slide deck with several different activities, designed to use in teletherapy or to guide a therapy session. (Use this slide deck as an outline for therapy services for face-to-face sessions, too!)
The first fine motor task asks kids to use ASL to sign the letters to spell different bugs and insects names. Kids can copy the slide deck to find the letter they need to spell each bug or insect’s name.
As they scan for the letters to spell ladybug, grasshopper, ant, or dragonfly, they are challenging their visual scanning and visual attention skills to look for each letter in the key.
The sign language forms is a great way to build finger isolation skills, dexterity, and motor planning skills while learning ASL.
Bug Play Dough Activity
The next part of the slide deck asks kids to use play dough to copy the caterpillar designs. This also challenges visual motor skills, but asks kids to create small balls of play dough and then use them to make the caterpillars.
Play dough builds intrinsic hand strength when children roll small balls of dough with their fingertips. This hand strengthening activity is a great one for building endurance, separation of the sides of the hand, and precision.
You may want to take the hand strengthening further with our Roll and Write Play Dough Mats. There is a bug theme play dough mat included that would be a great addition to this bug theme slide deck!
Bug Color and Cut Activity
The next section of the slides includes a color and cut activity to help kids with functional fine motor skills. Kids can use materials they have in their home to create different ladybug images. This challenges direction following, visual motor skills, bilateral coordination, and eye-hand coordination.
Bug Visual Motor Activity
The next part of the slide deck asks kids to copy designs to work on visual motor skills. This is a good way to integrate the fine motor warm up from the previous slides into a handwriting activity. Copying forms like the insects and bugs on these slides challenge kids in the skills they need to copy letters and words without omitting parts.
Bug Handwriting Activity
The last part of the bug theme is a handwriting activity. Kids can copy the different bug and insect names. There is a Jamboard option for these slides so if you’re using the slides in virtual sessions, kids can write right on the screen.
Free Bug Theme Slide Deck
Want these bug fine motor activities in your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below and you’ll get a slide deck with all of the activities listed above, as well as a link to a Jamboard version.
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.
