Working on gross motor skills, motor planning, or self-regulation? These sports gross motor exercises are perfect for kids that love all things sports! Use the football, baseball, hockey, and other sports activities to add athletic themed brain breaks and whole body movement.
Sports Gross Motor Exercises
These sports gross motor activities are a free therapy slide deck to use in virtual therapy sessions or in face-to-face sessions with an outline of activities.
There are so many ways you can use these sports movement activities to promote development of gross motor skills:
Copy the athlete to work on motor planning
Go through several slides to encourage sequencing and memory skills
Use the sports activities as heavy work in sports themed brain breaks
Copy the athletes on each slide to work on bilateral coordination, crossing midline, and segmenting the body.
Address posture, position changes, coordination, balance, and endurance
Use these sports exercises in a sports themed therapy session and encourage functional tasks like ball catching and throwing
Ask students to copy the words and work on handwriting with a sports related brain break between each word
How would you use these sports exercises in therapy?
Sports Exercises Slide Deck
This resource is a free Google slide deck that you can download and add to your Google drive. Open the slide deck in your Google classroom or right on your computer/device to encourage gross motor activities.
This is a great addition to other free slides that we’ve shared here on the website, and a fun weekly therapy theme when you’ve got a sports fan on your caseload.
To access this free therapy slide deck, enter your email address into the form below. You’ll receive an email containing a download. Save that PDF so you can use this again and again! Then click the link on the PDF and copy the exercises to your Google drive. Then get ready to lead therapy kiddos through motor planning and gross motor exercises that build skills!
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.
Visual Spatial Relations is an important visual perceptual skill that is important for many functional tasks. Spatial relations allows the organization of the body in relation to objects or spatial awareness. This is an important part of spatial awareness in handwriting and many other movement-based activities. An important part of visual spatial relations includes laterality and directionality. In general, these spatial relationship terms refer to left-right body awareness and the ability to perceive left/right relationship of objects.
Spatial Relations is being aware of oneself in space. It involves positioning items in relation to oneself, such as reaching for items without overshooting or missing the object. Most of us realize as we walk through a doorway that we need to space ourselves through the middle of the door.
Some with poor visual spatial skills may walk to closely to the sides and bump the wall. It also involves the fine motor tasks of coordinating handwriting with writing in spaces allowed on paper, placing letters within an area (lines), and forming letters in the correct direction.
What are spatial relations?
Spatial relations, or visual spatial awareness, refers to an organization of visual information and an awareness of position in space so the body can move and perform tasks. Spatial relations are needed for completing physical actions, moving in a crowded space, and even handwriting.
Knowing which shoe to put on which foot. Understanding that a “b” has a bump on the right side. Putting homework on the left side of the take home folder before putting books into a locker beside the gym bag. Visual spatial relations are everywhere!
More examples of spatial relations
Here are more everyday examples of spatial relations at work:
Letter formation and number formation
Writing letters without reversal
Reading letters without reversal
Sports
Completing puzzles
Walking in a crowded hallway without running into others
Visual spatial skills in occupational therapy activities are an important skill.
Visual Spatial Skills and Handwriting
Spatial relations, and the ability to organize physical movements related to visual information impacts handwriting.
You might be thinking: “Movement and handwriting!? What?? I want my kiddo to sit still and copy his homework into his planner without wiggling all over the desk!”
Ok, ok. Here is the thing: We are asking our kids to write way to early. Preschoolers are being given paper with lines and are asked to write their name with correct letter formation. Kids are being thrown into the classroom environment with expectations for legible written work an they are missing the necessary basics.
When kids are not developing the skills they need to hold a pencil, establish visual perceptual skills, and organize themselves, they are going to have struggles in handwriting.
NOTE: There are a few other baseline tools that kids need in order to establish a base for better handwriting. Fine motor experiences, positioning, attention are just a few of these areas.
Here are a few easy hands-on strategies to help with spatial relations in written work:
Spatial Relations Quick Tip: Write a letter on the student’s back using a finger or a pencil eraser. Ask the student guess what letter it is. Then, ask the child to air write the letter. (While holding a pencil, with large motion, whole arm motions AND very small with just the fingers!) Finally have him write the letter on paper.
These activities all require the ability to perceive an object in space. The way they interpret position in space to their body and to other objects in the environment impacts motor skills.
Spacing pieces of a puzzle amongst the others and writing in relation to the lines is one way to work on this skill.
Fine Motor Quick Tip: Encourage pinching activities. So many kids are exposed to screen technology from a young age. Screen interaction uses the pointer finger in isolation or just the thumb. These digits become strong and a dynamic pencil grasp is limited. Promote strengthening of the intrinsic muscles by pinching clay or tearing and crumbling small bits of paper. Read more about intrinsic muscle strengthening here.
Spatial Relations Activities
Try these movement-based spatial relations activities to work on the visual spatial skills needed for writing and completing everyday tasks:
Create a paper obstacle course. Draw obstacles on paper and have your child make his /her pencil go through the obstacles.
Draw circles, holes, mud pits, and mountains for them to draw lines as their pencil “climbs”, “jumps”, “rolls”, and even erases!
Create an obstacle course using couch cushions, chairs, blankets, pillows to teach left/right/over/under.
Write words and letters on graph paper. The lines will work as a guide and also a good spacing activity.
Use stickers placed along the right margin of to cue the student that they are nearing the edge of paper when writing.
Highlight writing lines on worksheets.
Draw boxes for words on worksheets for them to write within.
Practice directions. Draw arrows on a paper pointing up, down, left, and right. Ask your child to point to the direction the arrow is pointing. The child can say the direction the arrows are pointing. Then create actions for each arrow. Up may be jumping. Down may be squatting. The Left arrow might be side sliding to the left, and the Right arrow might be a right high kick. Next, draw more rows of arrows in random order. Ask your child to go through the motions and try to go faster and faster.
Other activities to incorporate spatial relations include:
Today’s free printable shares movement based activities to help kids improve their spatial relations. These are the skills kids need to write legibly. It includes tips and activities to improve spatial relations, that were mentioned above. This free handout is a great resource to add to your occupational therapy toolbox.
You will receive this handout when you join the Handwriting Tips and Tricks series. Each day over the course of 5 days, you’ll receive a free handwriting worksheet to use in addressing common handwriting issues.
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 week’s free slide decks are fun virtual picnic therapy activities that can be used to encourage motor skills in therapy sessions. I love the picnic theme for the upcoming warmer weather this summer, but also as a fun way to spend the last few weeks of the school year. Kids will love this virtual picnic in therapy or at home! Also be sure to grab this left right discrimination picnic theme slide deck.
Virtual Picnic
When you use this virtual picnic to facilitate gross motor skills, kids can move, strengthen core stability, work on bilateral coordination, crossing midline, motor planning, eye-hand coordination, body awareness, muscle memory, and many other skills.
Plus, the virtual picnic activities includes a visual perceptual skills activities, and picnic handwriting activities.
These virtual picnic activities go hand-in-hand with picnic crafts, fine motor activities, mindfulness activities, making a full week of camping themed or picnic themed fun for kids.
Combine the picnic therapy activities on this slide deck to some other, hands-on picnic themed activities to round out the therapy theme:
And, when you have a picnic, making picnic foods with kids is a must…further building fine motor skills, cognitive skills like planning, preparation, impulse control, and other executive functioning skills, and independence in daily tasks! Try these cooking with kids activities that help to build skills, but are GREAT picnic foods for kids to make:
Kids can participate in the virtual picnic by making one of these cooking activities (as long as they have a helper at home for their cooking activities) or, make pretend food and work on direction following, sequencing, planning, and task completion.
So, you can use these ideas to combine therapy recommendations for the home OR use these ideas in therapy sessions to create picnic themed therapy activities!
Want to add virtual picnic activities to your sessions or home programming? This week’s free slide deck covers several different occupational therapy intervention areas (and are great for physical therapy sessions, too.)
Picnic Gross Motor Activities
The first part of the slide deck includes picnic gross motor activities.
Kids can look at the image on the slide deck and pick out one piece of visual information in order to act out the picnic scene. Each picnic scene includes several people that are in various gross motor positions to challenge core strength, coordinatin, midline crossing, bilateral coordinaiton, motor planning, and more.
Kids can also work on visual perceptual skills such as visual discrimination, visual figure ground, visual closure, etc.
Children can then use this part of the slide deck to foster muscle memory, visual memory, and sequencing. You could go through this part of the slide deck several times and work on recalling physical motor sequences or play a memory game. The slides are pretty open-ended to facilitate a number of goal areas when it comes to gross motor skill, coordination, visual skills, etc.
Picnic Handwriting Activities
The next several slides in the slide deck are open-ended picnic writing prompts. There are more picnic scenes that include a variety of picnic items.
Children can scan the image and pull out words to write on paper, or they can use the list on the slide deck to copy and then find the hidden items in the picture.
To grade this activity, ask kids to compose a sentence using the picnic words on the slide. Or, ask children to circle the items on the slide using a shape feature on Google slides. These activities challenge the visual perceptual skills and visual motor skills needed for handwriting and copying written work.
Use these picnic handwriting activities to focus on letter formation, spacing, sizing, and overall neatness in handwriting skills.
Free Virtual Picnic Slide Deck
Want to add this virtual picnic slide deck to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below to access this slide deck. Don’t forget to check out all of the Free Slides that we have available for teletherapy and for facilitating therapy sessions with kids!
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 construction truck brain breaks are heavy work fun with a truck theme! The gross motor activities that kids can use as a brain break or a heavy work activity to help with attention, focus, and sensory input. The construction truck activities are great for kiddos that love all things trucks! You can access these heavy work activities in a free therapy slide deck and use it in teletherapy sessions or in face-to-face therapy (or at home and in the classroom, too!)
These are perfect for kiddos that love all things garbage trucks, backhoes, excavators, cranes, steam rollers, and more. We’ve got all the construction vehicle activities covered in this therapy set!
Construction Truck Brain Breaks
I love using brain breaks in themed activities that kids love. The thing is that children are drawn to certain topics or themes, and construction truck themes are no different. There is just something about garbage trucks, dump trucks, backhoes, cement trucks, and excavators that are irresistible to children.
These particular construction truck brain breaks offer an opportunity for kids to gain much-needed heavy work input in the way of proprioception. You can read more about proprioception and brain breaks here.
The truck activities also allow children to move while gaining vestibular input as well. Adding movement in a variety of planes and directions in conjunction with input from the eyes, and heavy work feedback from muscle and joint receptors, is able to contribute to posture, coordination, and appropriate response of the visual system.
Another reason to use heavy work activities like these truck brain breaks, is for the benefit of improving body awareness. Heavy work improves body awareness by incorporating proprioceptive input, with motor planning, attention, and “self-checks” that allow us to know where our body is in space during tasks. This is so important for kiddos facing more and more screen time than ever.
For more heavy work activities, try these heavy work cards that come in a variety of themes.
Free Construction Truck Brain Breaks
You can grab these construction truck activities and use them in teletherapy sessions, in face-to-face therapy sessions, in the classroom, or in the home. They are presented in a Google slide deck, so that they can be easily accessible from different devices and situations, using a Google drive.
Want to add this resource to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below.
NOTE: Try to add a personal email address for deliverability, as work emails (who have a strict security wall in place) may block the deliverability of the PDF email.
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 therapy slide deck to share: Superhero Gross Motor Activities! These superhero exercises are movement activities that challenge motor planning, balance, core strength, and crossing midline. When kids move through the superhero movement activities, they can build and develop many areas. Grab this gross motor activity set and start building those motor skills!
Superhero Gross Motor Activities
I wanted to create a gross motor activity set to go along with our superhero writing activity deck, so be sure to grab that free resource as well. This is just one of the free teletherapy slides for OT and PT that are available on the site.
The gross motor activity set includes 24 different slides and superhero exercises that challenges users to complete different movement patterns. Users can go through the exercises in order and work on various gross motor skills that can be a challenge to incorporate into teletherapy sessions, sometimes.
By following along with the different superhero gross motor positions, kids can challenge and build:
City Play Dough Mat (Free play mat)- perfect for saving by your favorite superhero!
Free Superhero Gross Motor Slide Deck
Want to add this slide deck to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address below and you will receive a PDF containing a link to copy the slide deck onto your Google drive. Save that PDF file, because you can come back to it again and again and send it to the kids on your caseload (or classroom) so they can make their own copy on their Google drive.
Note- You many need to use a personal email address in this form due to increased difficulties with sending deliverables to school district emails, organizations, and those with high security networks.
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.
If you’ve got a little one who is a big fan of unicorns, than this Unicorn Yoga is a sure win. I’ve had this unicorn craft on the site for years and wanted to add a few other unicorn activities to go with the craft. That’s where these stretches and gross motor exercises come into play.
Unicorn Yoga
Just in time for Unicorn Day (yep, that’s actually a thing! Unicorn Day is on April 9th), these unicorn yoga exercises are a great addition to your therapy toolbox.
The exercises are a free slide deck that can be used in teletherapy, or as a brain break activity to incorporate into a functional sensory diet or self-regulation strategy.
Kids that love all things unicorns will find these unicorn yoga poses a fun way to incorporate their interests into a meaningful and motivating sensory and gross motor exercise.
In each slide deck, kids can follow along with the unicorn yoga pose to challenge core strength, stability, strengthening, motor planning, crossing midline.
Other benefits of yoga exercises for kids include:
Also included in this slide deck is a deep breathing activity. The unicorn image shows children how to take in deep breaths for the sensory and regulating benefits. Kids can use these deep breathing strategies while completing each unicorn yoga pose throughout the slide deck.
Unicorn Yoga Slide Deck
To incorporate these slides into your therapy practice, you’ll access the slides via the form below. Then, you can pull up the slide deck onto your Google drive. Go through each yoga pose with children in your virtual therapy sessions, at home, or in the classroom. Kids can copy the positioning with your verbal cues, and correct any body positioning, depending on spatial awareness and body awareness needs.
Parents, teachers, and therapists may want to follow along with the cute unicorns on each slide, too!
Want to add this free therapy slide deck to your toolbox? Enter your email address below and the exercises will be delivered to your inbox.
NOTE: Please consider using a personal email address rather than a work or school district email. Due to recent changes with network security measures, the email delivering the resource may be blocked by your work institution.
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 week’s occupational therapy theme is all about the butterfly activities. And, these butterfly exercises help with coordination, motor panning, coordination, and add heavy work input. You’ll love the butterfly yoga activities that are fun, motivating, and engaging! Add these butterfly gross motor exercises to your Spring occupational therapy activities.
In this free slide deck, you’ll love the heavy work and gross motor coordination activities with a butterfly theme. Butterfly exercises get those kiddos moving and building coordination skills so they can move, play, and develop skills.
Butterfly exercises
Kids will love these gross motor exercises that challenge the following skills in kids:
Balance
Coordination
Motor planning
Crossing midline
Movement changes
Sequencing
When kids follow along with the visual images in the slides, they can work on planning out gross motor actions, crossing midline, and building core strength that helps with attention, following directions, and getting much needed proprioceptive and vestibular sensory input.
These are fantastic butterfly gross motor activities for preschool, Pre-K and grade-school kids as a brain break that builds gross motor skills.
Butterfly yoga
In the slide deck are butterfly yoga positions to challenge balance and build strength. These exercises use a variety of yoga positions with a butterfly theme. Some of the activities use the butterfly yoga pose and others have visual images of a butterfly net or other images to make the yoga exercises motivating and fun for kids.
Can they balance on one foot while pretending to catch a butterfly with their net?
Butterfly gross motor activities
You’ll also love the deep breathing exercise in the slide deck to encourage deep breathing. Try using this deep breathing exercise while doing the butterfly yoga!
Use the butterfly life cycle heavy work activities in the Heavy Work Cards to work on calming proprioceptive input.
Butterfly Exercises Slide Deck
Want to add these butterfly yoga and butterfly exercises to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below to access this slide deck.
Note that if you are using a school system’s email address, the PDF delivery may be blocked by your institution or workplace as a result of your system’s security measures. A personal email address may be better used.
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.
Because self-care is such a necessary component of battling caregiver burnout as a therapist, a beginner HIIT treadmill workouts can add the physical exercise piece that is often missing from self-care. Here, you’ll find HIIT beginner workouts for the treadmill. These are simple ways to get started with HIIT workouts and adding the much-needed self-care piece of occupational balance.
Self care activities play a role in addressing burnout that many occupational therapists experience. As occupational therapists, we often educate clients on
Here, we’ll cover easy strategies to get started with HIIT on a treadmill workout.
Physical Self Care- Having a simple physical exercise strategy in place helps when caregiver stress and burnout and overwhelm make you want to skip the physical exercise.
Implement an easy treadmill exercise program that doesn’t require a lot of thought or planning. Treadmill routines can address different needs including endurance, muscle building, weight loss, etc.
Beginner HIIT treadmill workouts
Adding physical activity that impacts physical wellbeing is the HIIT workout, or high intensity interval training. We talked about the use of a treadmill to assist with wellbeing in a previous post.
HIIT workouts are beneficial for many because they provide the physical health benefits in a shorter amount of time.
Those periods of high intensity running along with slower periods are very effective. There’s a reason why studies show that HIIT exercise impacts health and fitness. For busy therapists, quick and impactful exercises that helps with weight loss, and physical wellbeing.
And, in fact, one study determined that HIIT exercise and MIT (moderate intensity training) decreased anxiety, stress, and depression as well as increased resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic confinements to home. The study also determined that the HIIT intervention seemed to be more beneficial to reduce depression than the MIT intervention. These are great findings when it comes to addressing factors that impact burnout in therapists and overall self-care.
Put it on your schedule- When a physical exercise plan is written down, it becomes a part of your day visually. It’s easier to commit to an exercise plan that is on your daily schedule. And, having a fast routine a part of your day can create a daily habit that becomes part of the routine.
A self-care workout plan includes time for you, Warm up, quick sprints, recovery intervals, and a cool down. During the high or moderate intensity period of the exercise session, your heart rate should rise at a perceived level of exertion.
For beginners, getting started with a treadmill program can gain the benefits of a HIIT program but can start with a short activity plan.
Setting up a treadmill plan can begin with just 10 minutes of activity at first, and then can gradually build up to 20-30 minutes and then longer.
HIIT and MIT in treadmill intervals
An essential part of physical exercise includes a warm-up, whether that be stretching, walking, or deep breathing. Adding relaxing music or pump-up music that fits with your interests makes getting started fun. This can then be incorporated into a cool-down at the end of your treadmill workout. The warm-up and cool-down periods reduce risk of injury as well.
Use these clues as guides to determine if your treadmill intervals workout is high intensity interval training or moderate intensity:
Moderate intensity exercise
MIT, or moderate intensity training feels difficult, but at medium of the road level. Some signs of a somewhat difficult level include a quicker breathing rate, but you’re not out of breath. You should be able to easily carry on a conversation during your exercise. And, you should note perspiration during your exercise.
High intensity exercise
High intensity training is a more challenging level of exercise, where breathing rate is more vigorous. You need to pause during conversation to breathe, and perspiration occurs sooner in the exercise period. It is possible to quickly move from moderate level to a high level of intensity throughout exercising.
Interval training routinely switches between these levels of intensity.
Interval training sessions can switch between periods of higher rate of perceived exertion and lower rates of perceived exertion. It doesn’t take much to get started with HIIT. You can start with 30 seconds of high intensity running followed by 90 seconds of a recovery stage at a lower intensity.
Another option for interval training can include treadmill speed, or incline.
Still another HIIT workout can utilize the treadmill programs within the treadmill.
With the Horizon Fitness treadmills and fitness equipment, there are a number of programing options, including quick, 20 minute programs, and other streaming fitness opportunities. The print-intensity workout is pre-programmed and some of the treadmills have a button to select the intervals.
Check out the Horizon fitness deals, including free shipping that you can access now on the Horizon site.
Affiliate links are included in this post, but I only recommend products that I own, and love!
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.
Want to help kids with balance, coordination, strength, and mobility? Need some core strengthening and stability activities to help with balance and vestibular integration? These flower balance activities are fun ways to help kids work on these very areas so they are able to move, play, learn, and function in day to day tasks. And, it’s all packaged up in a free Google slide deck so you can use these balance exercises in therapy sessions, at home, in the classroom, or clinic. These are Spring gross motor activities that really build skills!
Balance Activities
You’ll find a lot of balance activities and exercises here on The OT Toolbox. We’ve shared balance beams, obstacle courses, brain breaks, prone extension activities, movement activities, and vestibular activities before. you may have even seen this DIY wobble disk made from ice. All of these activities are so great to help kids develop strength, coordination, movement pattern skills, and get them moving through play.
The free slide deck that I have available today, adds just one more balance tool into your therapy toolbox. It’s a fun way to challenge kids to move while copying visual images of body positioning. These exercises integrate visual processing to see the image and copy the positioning as well as motor skills as kids coordinate their body to move their arms or legs into the correct positioning.
I’ve tried to use both sides of the body in this flower balance activity, so they can work on left-right discrimination as well.
When kids incorporate one leg stance, and holding a body position in a squat or lunge, they are adding proprioceptive input, so they gain the calming regulatory benefits, too.
And, the therapy slide decks use a flower icon in various positions on each slide. So the user can copy the form by placing a pillow, stuffed animal, roll of socks, or bean bag into different places while maintaining balance. This can be a real challenge for some children!
There is a fun flower deep breathing exercise in the slide deck as well.
Free Balance Exercise Slide Deck
Want to use this free slide deck in teletherapy, in home programs, or in the classroom as a brain break? Just enter your email address into the form below.
NOTE- Due to an increase in security measures, many readers utilizing a work or school district email address have had difficulty accessing free resources from the delivery email. Consider using a personal email address and forwarding the delivery email to your work account.
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.
