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spatial awareness

Handwriting Spacing Puzzles

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Kids who struggle with spacing in written work sometimes write withallthewordstogether.  That’s pretty tough to read, right? When kids struggle with spatial awareness may write words and letters with little regard to spacing. 

A visual perception difficulty prevents kids from writing with adequate spacing on the page.  Other times, kids have trouble copying written work with appropriate spacing.  Still other kids might show difficulty with spatial awareness when writing at a fast speed or when writing in a journal or with free writing.  

These spacing puzzles are a great hands-on activity for helping kids to recognize and become more aware of spacing between words.  It’s a hands on approach to addressing visual perception in handwriting.


Spatial awareness puzzles for helping kids address visual perception skills needed for spacing between letters and words when writing.

Spatial Awareness Puzzles for Helping Kids Space Between Words When Writing


To practice spacing with a hands-on approach, try this spacing puzzle.  You’ll need just a couple of materials for the activity.

Affiliate links are included in this post.

Cardstock cut into squares.  
Marker
Cut the cardstock into squares.  Write letters on the cardstock squares.  Spread the letters out on the table.  You can use the letters in several different spatial awareness puzzles.

Spatial awareness puzzles for helping kids address visual perception skills needed for spacing between letters and words when writing.
Construct sentences with the letters, positioning the words in a jumbled manner regarding spacing.  A sentence such as “Can we play ball?” Might present as “Ca nwe playb all?” 

In this puzzle, kids can re-arrange the letters to accurately space between the cardstock letters.  

Use the jumbled sentences to practice spacing on paper by asking the child to copy the sentence with accurate spacing.  They can first re-arrange the letters on the table or just copy with accurate spatial awareness.

Another activity might include writing a jumbled sentence on paper.  Kids can use the letter pieces to construct the sentence appropriately and then write it on paper. 

Spatial awareness puzzles for helping kids address visual perception skills needed for spacing between letters and words when writing.
A third activity involves writing jumbled sentences on paper and asking kids to circle the letters to form words.  They can then copy the sentences using appropriate spacing between letters and words. 

All three of these spacing puzzles require the child to become aware of space between words.  When they slow down to position the words appropriately, they are likely to space between words when writing functionally. 

Let me know if these puzzles work for your child who is working on spatial awareness!

Spatial awareness puzzles for helping kids address visual perception skills needed for spacing between letters and words when writing.

This post is part of our Easy Quick Fixes to Better Handwriting series. 

You’ll also want to join the Sweet Ideas for Handwriting Practice Facebook group for more handwriting tips and tools.

Looking for more activities to help kids work on spacing between words and letters?  Try these:


Handwriting Spacing Tools


Space Martial Spacing Tool


Spatial Awareness in Handwriting

Box and Dot Handwriting Strategy

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This handwriting technique is a strategy that I’ve used many, many times in school-based Occupational Therapy.  It’s a handwriting strategy that uses boundaries of boxes and starting dots to help kids become more aware of letter size, letter formation, spatial organization, and use of lines.  


The box and dot handwriting strategy is perfect for kiddos who are working on placing letters appropriately on the lines with awareness of tall letters (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) that should touch the top line, small letters that should reach half-way between the top and base stimuli lines (a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z), and tail letters that should drop down below the base line (g, j, p, q, y).


Use a visual cue of boxes and starting dots to work on letter formation, line awareness, space awareness, and size awareness of letters when teaching kids to write.

Box and Dot Handwriting Strategy for Better Letter Formation and Spatial Organization

The dots in the boxes allow kids to practice letter formation by starting at the start point using the visual cue of a starting dot.  This is perfect for kids who are working on improving letter formation in a single stroke (r, m, n, etc) or letters that require the writer to pick up their pencil for portions of the letter formation (a, d, etc).  Sometimes, kids form the letters in “parts” as they build the letter instead of forming it accurately for speed and legibility.  The starting dot can help with pencil placement to address this part of letter formation. 


The sized boxes of this handwriting strategy are great for allowing kids to form letters with appropriate spacing, giving kids a definite visual cue for spatial awareness between letters and words.


Use a visual cue of boxes and starting dots to work on letter formation, line awareness, space awareness, and size awareness of letters when teaching kids to write.



This handwriting technique can be used as an accommodation that allows students to learn letter size, placement, and formation.  This accommodation can be used on regular paper, graph paper, or worksheets.  When students start to demonstrate better understanding on letter characteristics, the boxes and/or dots can be faded out and eventually removed.  


One strategy for grading down this tool is to first remove the dots from the boxes.  Other students may benefit from removing the boxes before the dots.  Simply adding a dot to writing spaces can provide the visual prompt needed for letter formation and placement. 


Another technique for lessening the amount of visual cue is to transition students to a highlighter space for the bottom space or bottom half of lined paper. 


Other times, using the boxes and dots on the words that are being copied are all that are needed for carryover of line awareness, letter formation, and spatial awareness. 


Use a visual cue of boxes and starting dots to work on letter formation, line awareness, space awareness, and size awareness of letters when teaching kids to write.

Love this handwriting trick?  Stop over to see all of the simple handwriting tricks for better handwriting in our 30 handwriting series. This post is part of our Easy Quick Fixes to Better Handwriting series. Be sure to check out all of the easy handwriting tips in this month’s series and stop back often to see them all.  


You’ll also want to join the Sweet Ideas for Handwriting Practice Facebook group for more handwriting tips and tools.
Get 29 pages of modified paper with a Christmas Theme for legible and neat Letters to Santa, Christmas Wish Lists, Thank You Notes, Holiday Lists, and MORE! 
GET YOUR Christmas Handwriting Pack!

Map Skills Game for Building Spatial Concepts

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Build spatial concepts with a map activity

This map skills game for spatial concepts uses the ability to integrate spatial relations with what the eyes see with motor skills, or eye-hand coordination. It’s a fun map activity for occupational therapy or play!

Similarly, a drawing mind map incorporates spatial awareness on paper with complex thoughts and ideas, just like using a map as a skill-building game might in real life!

Summertime fun in our house means a lot of nights in the backyard with the family.  We catch fireflies, play basketball in the driveway, play baseball on the lawn as the sun sets, have fires in the fire pit, and play heated games of tag, hide-and-go-seek, and make lots of summer memories.  Most important of all, summer means time with family.


One thing that we love to do as a family is come up with fun games with a lot of running and active play.  This backyard map game for building spatial concepts was a great way to play together as a family at the end of a hot summer day.  


When the sun starts to set and the fireflies start twinkling, it is so much fun to create family adventures right in the backyard.  We used our Energizer headlight and lantern in a family map game that added a directionality learning opportunity to play.


Map Skills Game

Drawing and creating maps is a great skill for kids to practice. Similarly, the process of using drawing mind maps builds on these visual motor skills, as well.

  When kids picture a scene in their mind’s eye and use that image to draw a map on paper, they are using higher thinking skills and directional concepts like over, under, around, and through.




This map activity is great for building and developing spatial concepts and higher level thinking right in the backyard, using a map and lights to develop spatial relations.

To play an outdoor map game that builds spatial concepts with the family, first ask your kids to picture their backyard.  

  • Tell them to identify landmarks and borders of the lawn.
  • Is there a swing set off to the side?
  • Where is the driveway or a large tree and how do these physical features relate to the back of the house?  

Imagining a space and where items are in relation to others allow the child to use spatial relations as they draw them onto paper.

This map activity is great for building and developing spatial concepts and higher level thinking right in the backyard, using a map and lights to develop spatial relations.

While drawing, kids can decide how to draw aspects of the backyard.  They might sketch out a tree or a sandbox area or they might use geometric shapes to represent the items.  

A circle could become a tree and a square could become a play area.  Kids will have to picture the layout of the backyard and draw the features in relation to one another.  

Spatial reasoning is an essential skill needed for tasks such as maneuvering down a crowded hallway, placing words on a line when writing, and understanding spatial concepts such as “left”, “right”, and “next to”.


Once the map is drawn, slip it into a plastic page protector and attach it to a clipboard. Grab your headlight, flashlight, or lantern and take the whole family outside to play a map game in the backyard.


Map Game for Building Spatial Concepts



1. To play the game, have one person hide a small toy like a rubber ball somewhere in the backyard.  

2. Then, that person can use a dry erase marker to mark an “X” on the sheet protector to show where the item is hidden.  

3. The kids can then use the map to locate the item by determining where the object is on the map.  Doing this map game in the dark with a headlight or lantern is a great way to build map reading skills and spatial concepts because the child can’t just scan around the lawn to find the hidden object.  

4. They must find the “X” on the map and read the map to locate the physical object hidden in the backyard.


5. Take the learning and spatial concepts a little further by asking your child to verbalize where the object is hidden and ask them to use directionality terms like “to the left”, “beside”, and “right”.  They can describe the routes they would take to get to the hidden object.

This map activity is great for building and developing spatial concepts and higher level thinking right in the backyard, using a map and lights to develop spatial relations.

Using the clipboard to follow a map allows the child to focus on where they are going.  My kids loved having a headlamp on for our backyard map game because it freed their hands to hold the clipboard, find and hide the hidden ball, and use the dry erase marker to draw an “X” for the other people in our family.  

We played this game over and over again so the erasable dry erase marker and sheet protector allowed us to keep playing long after the sun went down!


I loved playing this backyard map game with my kids and we were excited to use our flashlights to play.  The versatile lanterns can be used for so many memory-making activities with the whole family.  

From filling up a homemade jar with fireflies in a lit area to lighting a S’more making tray, backyard flashlight games can help make the summer nights full of family memories. Add this outdoor activity to your list of backyard lawn games!

 

This map activity is great for building and developing spatial concepts and higher level thinking right in the backyard, using a map and lights to develop spatial relations.

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.

Pre-Writing Lines Activity

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Pre-writing lines activity to help kids work on handwriting lines and pencil control with an Easter egg theme.

Working on the underlying pre-writing skills of handwriting is SO important in handwriting. This pre-writing lines activity is a fun Easter occupational therapy activity, but it’s also a powerful tool for building the foundation for handwriting. This is one of our favorite Wikki Stix activities to support pre-writing development.

You know we like to share handwriting activities around here, right? This Easter egg pre-writing activity is a fun way for young children to work on pre-writing skills in order to build a base for letter formation and pencil control. While we made this activity an Easter egg-ish shape, you could do this activity any time of year and use any shape to work on pencil control within a confined space.  

Related: Try this pre-writing lines fine motor activity to incorporate heavy work feedback in developing prewriting lines.

Preschoolers and Toddlers will love this early handwriting activity!  All of these skills are needed before a child can form letters and work on line awareness in Kindergarten.  If a child is showing difficulty with forming diagonals in letters like “A” or “M”, this would be a fun way to work on building the skill for improved legibility in written work.

 
Work on pre-writing lines needed for neat handwriting and letter formation with this wikki stix Easter egg (or any time of the year!) pre-writing and pencil control practice activity.


Pre-Writing Lines Handwriting Precursor Activity

 
This post contains affiliate links.
 
We used just a few materials for this activity:

Dry Erase Board 
Dry Erase Markers 
Wikki Stix (Amazon affiliate link)


 Using THIS Dry Erase Board worked out great for this activity, because we did the same writing activity on the reverse side, which has a chalkboard. Writing with small pieces of chalk is a fantastic fine motor and intrinsic muscle strengthening activity to work on the fine motor skills needed for endurance in drawing and coloring, as well as the tripod grasp needed for an appropriate grasp on the pencil. A chalkboard surface for drawing lines is much more resistant than a smooth dry erase surface, providing more feedback during line formation. 


 We used these Dry Erase Markers for their fine point and colorful selection, which made making these Easter eggs a creative activity, too. My preschooler loved picking out the colors to create patterns. 

 The last item we needed for this handwriting precursor activity was (Amazon affiliate link) Wikki Stix. As an Occupational Therapist, I feel like I’m always pushing the benefits of Wikki Stix. The bendable and mold-able sticks are a great fine motor and handwriting tool.  In this activity, I bent one or two wikki stix into an egg shape.  You could also make circles, squares, or any shape for your handwriting task.

Developmental Progression of Pre-Writing Strokes

As a child develops, they are typically able to copy lines and shapes with increasing accuracy.  Here are the general ages of development for pre-writing lines:
 
  • Age 2- Imitates a vertical line from top to bottom
  • Age 2-Imitates a Horizontal Line
  • Age 2-Imitates a Circle
  • Age 3- Copies (After being shown a model) a Vertical Line from top to bottom
  • Age 3 Copies a Horizontal Line from left to right
  • Age 3- Imitates a Cross 
  • Age 4- Copies a Cross 
  • Age 4- Copies a Right and Left Diagonal Line
  • Age 4- Copies a Square 
  • Age 4- Copies an “X”
  • Age 5- Copies a Triangle
 
The developmental progression of these shapes allows for accuracy and success in letter formation.
 
Get a FREE Developmental Progression of Pre-Writing Strokes printable HERE. 
 
Work on pre-writing lines needed for neat handwriting and letter formation with this wikki stix Easter egg (or any time of the year!) pre-writing and pencil control practice activity.

 

Easter Egg Pre-Writing Strokes Activity

For this activity, we used the Wikki Stix to right on the dry erase board. I created egg shaped ovals with the wikki stix. I then showed my preschooler how to draw lines across the eggs to create patterns and designs.  
 
We practiced horizontal lines (going from left to right) and vertical lines (going from top to bottom).  We also added circles within the boundaries of the wikki stix and diagonal lines, too.  
 
The physical border provided by the wikki stix gave a nice area and cue for pencil control.  Try doing this activity with progressing level of developmental line skill.  You can also work on writing letters inside the wikki stix to build spatial and size awareness in handwriting.
 
Extend the activity:
Use the wikki sticks to do this activity on paper or a chalkboard.  Other ideas might be using crayons, markers, or a grease pencil for more feedback through resistance and proprioceptive input to the hands. 
 
 
Work on pre-writing lines needed for neat handwriting and letter formation with this wikki stix Easter egg (or any time of the year!) pre-writing and pencil control practice activity.
 
 
 
 
 
 

More Pre-writing Lines Activities

Some of my favorite Handwriting activities are multi-sensory and incorporate motor planning activities for building pre-writing lines as a foundation for handwriting:  

More Easter activities:

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:

Spring fine motor kit set of printable fine motor skills worksheets for kids.
  • Lacing cards
  • Sensory bin cards
  • Hole punch activities
  • Pencil control worksheets
  • Play dough mats
  • Write the Room cards
  • Modified paper
  • Sticker activities
  • MUCH MORE

Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.

Spring Fine Motor Kit
Spring Fine Motor Kit: TONS of resources and tools to build stronger hands.

Grab your copy of the Spring Fine Motor Kit and build coordination, strength, and endurance in fun and creative activities. Click here to add this resource set to your therapy toolbox.

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.

Teaching Kids to Write Their Name the Fun Way!

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We are working a lot on writing lower case letters these days.  My five year old has been trying so hard to write his name and is a trooper when it comes to practicing.  Sometimes it’s not a child’s interest to write letters of their name (and other letters needed in handwriting, too!)  This letter forming name writing activity is perfect for kids who need more practice and are just plain tired of writing their name over and over again.  
Adding a sensory and motor spin on forming the letters of their name can add interest and fun to handwriting and name writing.  Sometimes ordering the letters in name writing can be difficult for young kids.  This name building activity is adaptable to so many skill levels of kids who are working on writing their name.


Teaching kids to write their name and practice letter formation with sensory soup

Teaching kids to write their name with sensory and movement:

To practice our name writing with sensory and motor movements, we used these foam craft sticks that we received from our friends at www.craftprojectideas.com.  Draw lines across the sticks in 3/4 to one inch increments.  Have your child snip the craft sticks into pieces along the lines.  This scissor activity was a hit with my son.  Snipping the foam craft sticks provides a satisfying texture and allows accuracy with the thick resistance and thicker lines.  
Use the small foam pieces to practice letter formation.  The small size is perfect for kids who are working on size awareness in their handwriting. 
Pressing a pen into the foam surface provides great feedback for letter formation.  Use verbal and visual cues.
Build your name sensory soup activity
We used those foam letter pieces to make a sensory soup.  Fill a bowl or bin with water and add the foam letters.  They will float on the water surface.  Visual scanning and picking out the correct letter is a great sensory and fine motor experience.  Kids can work on the order of letters in their name as they look for the letters.  
name writing and learning activity for kids
I drew a rectangle on a plastic plate and had my son build his name with the letters.  The wet foam pieces will stick to the plastic plate.  Kids are encouraged to build their name in order while keeping the letters in a line given the visual cue of the rectangle.  This is great for kids who will soon be concentrating on line awareness and spatial awareness in name writing in Kindergarten and in older grades. Related, check out our recommendations for name practice in kindergarten.
Teaching kids to build words and name with letter order, spatial awareness, and line awareness
 
We’ve been having fun with letter formation and handwriting and will be sharing more creative activities soon!  For now, check out these ideas for handwriting: 

Fun ways to work on Letter Formation:

High-Contrast Letter Formation
Sensory Letter Formation Practice
Tracing Letters: Letter Formation Handwriting Practice with Chalk
Tracing Lines with a DIY Light Box

Tripod Grasp Activities for Kids:

Improving Pencil Grasp With Fine Motor Play Activities
Fine Motor Coordination with a Cereal Box (activity to improve tripod grasp)Gift Guide: Toys to Improve Pencil Grasp

This post is part of Preschool Powol Packet’s name recognition writing series. Stop by and see all of the great ways to practice name formation.

Christmas Pencil Control Activities for Kids DIY Workdsheets

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We did a few Christmas Themed Pencil Control Activities with DIY worksheets this week. 
 
This is so good for Little Guy (age 4) who needs a little practice with controlling the pencil when he’s writing letters.  He’s only just begun writing his name, so this is the perfect age to improve pencil control as a preparation for more letter formation and line awareness as he starts to write on lines in coming months and years.  New handwriters and kids who are not yet writing can do these easy (and fun) pencil control activities as a prep activity.  And better yet, these pencil control activities are beginning homemade worksheets with a fun Christmas Theme!
 


 

Pencil Control Activities with a Christmas Theme

Little Guy loved this candy cane activity.  I drew a quick candy cane on white paper with thin spaces on a diagonal.  I had Little guy use a red marker to draw lines inside the thin stripes.  We made a few of these candy canes because Little Guy wanted to keep going and make more! 
 
{Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}
 
 
For a new pencil user, encourage your child to draw the lines from right to left (**not like in this picture, oops!**) and the child should rest their arm on the table surface.  Little Guy needs verbal and a physical cue to rest his hands on the table surface for better control.  This will improve pencil control when the child is attempting to draw a line in a certain area.
 
 

He kept his lines within the stripes very nicely, and did not often go over the edges of the candy cane.  This is a great activity for a new writer!

Our next activity was encouraging tripod grasp to manipulate pony beads.  I had Little Guy pick up the beads and place them onto the bulbs of a Christmas Tree.  You may have seen this picture on our Instagram feed or Facebook page.

Little Guy had to keep the beads on the circles and really concentrate on the lines.  To manage the beads and place them gently on the circles, encouraged a tripod grasp with extended wrist for improved pencil control.

 

This Christmas tree was another easy DIY pencil control worksheet to throw together.  Baby Girl (age 2) really liked this activity too.

I didn’t capture a picture of the next step, but I had Little Guy connect the bulbs with a  pencil.  I asked him to keep the pencil from going in the bulb, because it might break the light!  Connecting the dots and concentrating on the lines of the circles was a great way to work on pencil control.

 

More DIY Christmas Pencil Control Worksheets for Kids

Our last pencil control activity was a present themed one.  We started by making presents with some paper tubes shaped into a square.  We used our Spill Proof Paint Cups
to hold the paint and stamped some squares.

 

We waited until the next day when our present squares were dry.

 
Baby Girl kind of took over this activity before Little Guy got a chance to practice his pencil control…

I showed Little Guy how to make crosses on the presents (over Baby Girl’s added decorations!) so he could practice simple copying.  He was to make the lines top to bottom and left to right to encourage improved pencil control in letter formation.  He did pretty well!

 
 

Thanksgiving Felt Board Patterns Direction Following Turkey

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This Thanksgiving Felt Board activity was just the thing we needed one afternoon when Little Niece and Nephew were at our house.  It was a super cold day and we were happy to stay inside warm and cozy playing and having fun with a few Thanksgiving activities! 

Thanksgiving Felt Board

This felt board was super easy to put together.  I have a big sheet of orange colored fleece fabric that we use for all kinds of activities and play.  It makes the perfect fuzzy background for felt play, pretend play when we need to have an impromptu living room teddy bear picnic, and the perfect baby doll blanket!

This time we used our fleece to make an easel cover for our Felt Board Direction Following Turkey.  
We’ve been doing a lot of turkey crafts and activities leading up to Thanksgiving, and this one was even more fun for the littler ones.  Baby Girl (age 2) and Little Nephew (age 2) both loved moving the felt pieces all over the board.  And worked on fine motor skills and direction following and patterning at the same time!  


This post contains affiliate links.
Just a few supplies are needed for this activity. 
  • The Orange Fleece worked perfectly to hold the felt pieces of our turkey. 
  • The rest of the turkey was easy to make using Assorted felt pieces. 
  • A few brown circles, feathers of different colors, little turkey feet, a beak, and a wattle and our turkey was ready for creating! 
I snipped a few little pieces of felt and glued them to the backs of Googley eyes.  Then the googly eyes could stick to the fleece.
The fleece was perfect to throw over our Easel.  The fleece stayed in place pretty well without sliding much.  With the material up on an included surface, the kids were able to manipulate the pieces of the turkey while using an extended wrist. 
This positioning of their hand while managing small pieces prepares them for handwriting with a proper position of the wrist and fingers while holding a pencil.
I put one turkey together so the Toddlers could see where all of the pieces went. 
This task required visual scanning and direction following.  We put our turkeys together with multi-step directions to add a little difficulty to the task.
Little Guy (age 4) worked on some patters with the feathers.  We used an AB pattern for our turkey feathers.

Little Nephew is a smarty when it comes to identifying colors.  He told us all of the colors of the feathers easily!

Working those little pieces was a great fine motor task for these guys!
They needed to use a pincer grasp to pinch the littlest pieces, all while maintaining that extended wrist. 
We had such fun day with our Turkey patterns, direction following, and fine motor play.  This would be an easy activity to put together in these last days before Thanksgiving!

Teaching Over, Under, Around, and Through

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teach spatial concepts over under around and through with play

Let’s cover a few different directional concepts; This over, under, around, and through activity for preschool is a spatial relations concept. These positional concepts are an important part of preschool development.

Teaching Directional Concepts: Over, Under, Around, and Through

 


Learning Spatial Concepts during play

One rainy pre-Halloween day, I had an idea to bring a pumpkin into our play.  We were going to play a game teaching Spatial Concepts.

Teaching Spatial Concepts to Preschoolers and Toddlers through play. Over, under, around, and through and their need in functional tasks like shoe tying and handwriting.
 
What are spatial concepts??  
 
It’s those direction/spatial relationship/preposition words that tell you where something is related to something else… you know… beside, in front of, behind, over, under, around,  through, last, etc. 

 


These are great concepts to teach to preschoolers. 

Positional concepts are especially important in pre-handwriting.  Once they begin handwriting, kids are taught line awareness, placement of letters on the top/middle/bottom lines, how to move over a space between words, how the “y” has a tail that hangs below the bottom line…So many times, a messy hand-writer is showing problems with spatial organization and concepts.

Spatial concepts and directional terms are also important in teaching shoe tying…BIG need for understanding “AROUND the loop”, “push the lace THROUGH with your thumb”)…
 
They can begin learning these concepts by discovering where their bodies are in relationship to objects.  
 
We pulled the couch cushions off of the couches and set up tunnels, bridges (cushion over a blanket…use that imagination!), and obstacles.
 
My kids love the couch cushions…There are definitely days that we use the couch cushions more on the floor than we do actually on the couches.
 
I started singing to them, “Where is pumpkin? Where is pumpkin? Here I am, THROUGH the tunnel!” to the tune of Where is Thumbkin, and changing the last line depending on where the pumpkin was that time.
 

Teaching Over, Under, Around, and Through

Preschool children will love to learn and play with spatial concepts over, under, around, and through with this pretend play activity.
 
You totally don’t need to use a pumpkin for this…you could use a stuffed animal, action figure, apple…whatever would spark your child’s interest!
 
 
We changed it up after a bit.  And for something different, I would tell them to first go over the bridge, then go around the cushion wall, then go through the tunnel.  
 
They loved going over, under, around, and through obstacles to get to where the pumpkin was.  And then making up their own sequence to get to the pumpkin.  
 
 
 
Baby Girl just enjoyed going over cushions.
 

 

Pretend Play with Spatial Concepts

Big Sister and Little Guy decided to change the game into a pumpkin patch, complete with a cushion “tractor” to take them to the pumpkin patch and some stuffed animal “kids” to join them.  
 
 
The stuffed kids got to ride the tractor…
 
 
And go into the pumpkin patch.
 
 
And pay for their pumpkins with “coins”.
 
 
Real-world application of the spatial concepts we learned???
 
“Cuddles the Bear gets to go in the pumpkin patch in front of Puppy, because she is pink, and that’s good manners”.
 
Ok, then. 
 

More Preschool Spatial Learning Activities


Want to continue the spatial concept learning with your preschooler?  

  • Add music…Sing and act out “Over the river and through the woods”, “Going on a bear hunt”, and “The bear went over the mountain”.
  • Grab a basket or container of any kind. Toddlers love putting things “in”/taking them “out”.  Add more complexity for bigger kids by adding multi-step directions. “Take 5 steps forward, go under the chair, then crawl around the blanket”.
  • Make a backyard map to work on directional concepts.
  • Play “I Spy” by looking around the room and finding 3 things that are under something, or 3 things that are behind something.
  • Pencil control worksheets you can make at home
  • We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
 

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.

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