This was an easy and fun way to spend an afternoon. And when Baby Girl woke up from her nap, she loved it too.
I put out six colors of play dough and a little bin of colored beads, paper clips, and other little things.
Fine Motor Strengthening for kids
They had so much fun matching up the colors. Baby Girl just loved pushing the little beads and things into the Play Dough.
I love her little knuckle dimples 🙂
Pushing the little objects into the dough is resistive and an excellent fine motor strengthening exercise for little hands. They are also working on their tripod grasp when they push the beads into the Dough.
Big Sister said we needed to wash all of the little objects after we were done. We put all of them into a bin of water and everyone had fun swishing them around.
Drain them into a colander and you are good to go 🙂
We made a quick Valentine’s Day sensory bin using shredded paper one year and it was a big hit. This shredded paper sensory bin used paper from our paper shredded and some other materials found around the home as we worked on fine motor skills and tactile exploration. Here is another Valentine’s Day sensory bin to try as well. Both of these are great additions to your occupational therapy Valentine activities.
Shredded paper sensory bin
This sensory bin was a Valentine’s day activity for us, but the shredded paper sensory bin can be used with any theme. You could use any sensory bin base material but for this one, we’re using shredded paper.
You’ll need just shredded paper, some cardboard tubes, and pipe cleaners. Then add other scoops, stirrers, and other materials if you like: recycled bottle caps, cookie cutters, craft pom poms, etc.
To make this sensory bin, you’ll start by making colored paper.
You can also add Valentine’s Day sensory bin materials like the ones found in our new Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit. The Kit contains 25 pages of hands-on materials designed to develop and refine fine motor skills in kids, but some of those items are perfect for adding to sensory bins like this one. Simply cut (or have the child cut out) the images of hearts and other Valentine items. Then, you can scatter the sensory bin items into the sensory material. Hide them and have the child find them.
How to dye paper
To dye the paper, all you need are these items:
shredded paper from the paper shredder
a plastic bag
food coloring
water
First, place the shredded paper into the plastic bag. We used just regular junk mail, printer paper, and recycled newspapers and placed it into a plastic store bag.
Add a few drops of food coloring
I added about 10 drops of food coloring, and some water and tied the top up. Just a few drops of water is needed. If you add too much, it will be a goopy mess, so start by adding a few drops at a time.
You could also use a gallon sized plastic zip top baggie and seal the top up tightly.
Next, ask the kids to shake the bag. This is a good way to incorporate movement and vestibular sensory input.
We shook the bag until all of the paper in the bag was coated in red color, and then poured the damp paper into a cardboard box to let it dry for a few days.
Shredded paper sensory bin
Once the shredded paper is dry, it is time to play.
The folded toilet paper tube hearts are a fun addition for wrapping with pipe cleaners for a fine motor workout.
Use a toilet paper tube or cardboard tube from a paper towel roll and fold it in half to create a heart shape. Kids can pinch along the length of the paper tube to crease the cardboard roll into a heart. Then, use scissors to cut the toilet paper tube into small heart strips.
What a fine motor workout!
Dyeing Paper with Food Coloring!
Little Guy and Baby Girl had a little spatula battle. Oh, this girl LOOOOVES to play with her big brother and sister. She loves the action and chaos the big kids bring to Every. Thing!
VALENTINES FINE MOTOR ACTIVITIES
If you need more hand eye coordination activities for Valentine’s Day fine motor fun, try the Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit.
The Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit is here! This printable kit is 25 pages of hands-on activity sheets designed to build skills in pinch and grasp strength, endurance, eye-hand coordination, precision, dexterity, pencil control, handwriting, scissor skills, coloring, and more.
When you grab the Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit now, you’ll get a free BONUS activity: 1-10 clip cards so you can challenge hand strength and endurance with a counting eye-hand coordination activity.
If eye-hand coordination, visual motor skills, and handwriting are tasks that you are working on with children, you’ll love both of these free therapy slide decks. Use them to outline occupational therapy interventions or to use in teletherapy sessions this time of year.
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.
There is something about kids and a pile of shaving cream…They Looooove to play in it!
We added some old sprinkles from last Easter to give this Indoor Play Idea a different twist. They loved feeling the texture of the sprinkles on their hands while they played. It probably has a great exfoliating factor too 🙂
Grasp Strengthening and Learning Colors With SNOW???
Some days, it is just HARD to get the kids dressed up in snowsuits/gloves/hats/boots/scarves…only to bring them back in 10 minutes later because the baby wants to follow the big kids, but can’t pick up her boots to walk through the snow that is up to her mid-calf…so she stands still in the yard until I pick her up…
Today was one of those days.
We needed an activity for after baby-nap-time and before dinner-making-time and this was just the one!
I had this idea in mind since right after Christmas when we got some snow, and I wanted to dye it using eye droppers. After looking everywhere around the house, I just can. not. find the eye droppers! So, on to another idea…
Turkey Baster
Spray Bottle
Scoops and Spoons.
These kids were so beyond excited to see me setting this up. They helped stir the food coloring into the bowls of water. (Get Dollar Store food coloring for projects like this! So cheap, and it will last you many, many projects…) But they could not guess what we were doing with it. Once I brought the snow in, there were cheers!
We did some mixing of colors on the snow…What does red and blue make? We had green in the spray bottle and it was fun to change the stream to get more color on the snow. They were pretty excited to get brown, of course 🙂
Squeezing the turkey baster bulb and the spray bottle nozzle is wonderful for grasp strengthening in hands.
The strength of the whole had is needed for so many fine motor work in play and school based activities.
This was the extent of the mess…not too bad! They kept the tray on the right pretty clean of color mostly since that was Baby Girl’s side and she was busy eating the snow 🙂
I wanted try making these cute salt dough handprint ornaments I saw on The Imagination Tree earlier this week. The recipe was simple and it was so FUN! My daughter had a blast mixing the dough with her hands for a long time.
I rolled them out pretty thick so they had to bake for several hours on low heat (200F). I baked them on a silicon baking sheet that had some textured bumps on the back. I let them sit out overnight turned upside-down to make sure they were nice and hard, ready to paint!
My daughter had so much fun with this one. Little guy thought it was pretty neat feeling when he pushed his little hand into the dough.
We decided to make it pretty simple, just paint the handprint one color and the outside another color. I painted their names and the year on the back with black paint to make it stand out.
String a little string through the holes and tie them in a knot, Ta-Da! Simple handprint ornaments to enjoy for years to come!
I am so happy to have these little handprints! I don’t want to think about how little they are going to look when comparing them next year…these little babies are growing so fast!
We’ve had this ice cube tray/chocolate mold thing for a few years and have used it to make all kinds of yummy treats. I had an idea to make ice cubes with it and Little Guy thought that was a pretty good idea.
The snowflake ice cubes have been in our freezer for a few days now and he was very excited when we popped them out. (He had helped me dye the water green and pour it into the ice cube tray so he knew it was in there, just waiting for a fun activity!) We put them into a bin of water right on the kitchen floor.
We decided to make it more Christmas-y and add some red food coloring to the water.
Chasing those ice cubes around with the ladles and spoons really helps with visual motor skills, eye-hand coordination, and motor planning.
Baby Girl took over after Little Guy moved on to something else. She played for a while in this. Look how small the green snowflake ice cubes are!
We had a great weekend of playing at home, snuggles, laughter, and enjoying every bit of crazy-awesome-chaos!
This Christmas sorting game and ornament sensory bin is perfect for toddlers during the holiday season. It’s a Christmas sensory bin idea that little ones love! Simply grab some baby-safe ornaments (plastic and soft ornaments work!) and put them into a basket on the floor for baby play during the Christmas season.
Sort the ornaments by color. Color sorting is great for toddlers and babies.
Day 18 of 25 Days of Christmas Play….
This busy activity is great for toddlers and babies (supervised!) for color concepts, shape and texture exploration, transferring skills, language development, and so much more! Grab some child-friendly Christmas ornaments, a basket or bin, and get ready for some excitement from your tot!
Ornament Sorting Basket for Toddlers
This day of play involved sorting, matching, memory, and just plain fun!
We took a few ornaments off of the tree and put them in a basket. My little guy just loved this game because he has been trying to play with these for weeks now! All of the ornaments on our tree are fairly kid-friendly, so I figured why not? I picked two of each color so there could be some matching, some of the same size and some different, some smooth, and some rough. We had to have a few sparkly too for my daughter:)
My 4 year old had fun sorting them by color and sorting them by biggest and smallest…
We also had fun playing a game of memory. I would put a few it the basket and my daughter would take a look, then turn her head and cover her eyes while I took one away. She had to try to remember which one is missing.
It was also fun sorting them by texture, the ones on the left had sparkles and the ones on the right were smooth and shiny! This is a great way to work on vocabulary as well as learning about textures for my little guy. He is learning new words every day and trying his hardest to repeat.
And do babies love anything more than putting things in and out of a basket?!?
We had so much fun with this easy Christmas activity!
Looking for done-for you therapy activities this holiday season?
This print-and-go Christmas Therapy Kit includes no-prep, fine motor, gross motor, self-regulation, visual perceptual activities…and much more… to help kids develop functional grasp, dexterity, strength, and endurance. Use fun, Christmas-themed, motor activities so you can help children develop the skills they need.
This 100 page no-prep packet includes everything you need to guide fine motor skills in face-to-face AND virtual learning. You’ll find Christmas-themed activities for hand strength, pinch and grip, dexterity, eye-hand coordination, bilateral coordination, endurance, finger isolation, and more.
I’ve had this batch of salt dough mixed up (only the dry ingredients just waiting for a great day to make some ornaments. I wanted to try Gingerbread Scented Salt Dough for an added Christmas-y smell. We had the chance to mix this up yesterday and luckily, my niece and nephew was here to help us play…
Babies love playing in dough!
Little Guy was so excited to help me mix it all together.
Use your basic salt dough recipe and add the extra spices to make it extra special 🙂
2 cups of flour
1 cup of salt
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp allspice
1 cup of warm water
mix the dry ingredients together (store it for a week like us, if you need to!). Stir in the water. Knead the dough on a flat surface for 10-ish minutes ( less is ok if babies/Little Boys are anxiously waiting to play 🙂
I’ve seen recipes that say let it stand for 20 min before rolling, but we dove right in.
I got the cinnamon allspice, and nutmeg at the dollar store to use just for (inexpensive) scented projects like this one…
Mix it all up…
And knead it for a few minutes.
I had lots of help on the kneading 🙂
Roll it out…
I had the babies make their hand prints for ornaments. So cute!
Little Guy looooved using a straw to poke holes to hang the gingerbread men. A few of them have a couple of extra holes…
It does look pretty fun, doesn’t it 🙂
All ready to go into the oven…
I baked them on 300 for 3 hours. The house smelled AMAZING!
We strung it on pretty ribbon and hung in the tree. I love our little many-holed Gingerbread man garland!
We tried the garland strung along our banister where our stockings are, too (no fireplace in our house!)
Big Sister gave it her seal of approval…”That looks very awesome, Mom!”
This was a fun multi-sensory Christmas Play activity for all ages. I, for one, loved the cinnamon-ey smell in the house all day!
This easy sensory bin ideas is a Christmas sensory bin, using something you might have around the home during the holiday season: Christmas tinsel and bows! Let’s explore how we used this sensory play activity to develop skills.
Christmas Tinsel and Bows Sensory Bin
Day 13 of 25 Days of Christmas Play
I wanted to put together a sensory bin for the babies on a day that my nephew would be with us. I knew this is something that him and Baby Girl would love playing in.
This sensory play bin was so easy and quick to throw together.
The babies loved playing in this. They had a fun time taking the cookie cutters out and then putting them back in over and over (and over) again!
Be sure to keep an eye on the kids with this sensory bin!
This was such an easy and entertaining activity. Perfect for a little pre-nap play!
Stop by tomorrow, we have a great salt dough recipe that we’ve been working on! Have you seen the
Looking for done-for you therapy activities this holiday season?
This print-and-go Christmas Therapy Kit includes no-prep, fine motor, gross motor, self-regulation, visual perceptual activities…and much more… to help kids develop functional grasp, dexterity, strength, and endurance. Use fun, Christmas-themed, motor activities so you can help children develop the skills they need.
This 100 page no-prep packet includes everything you need to guide fine motor skills in face-to-face AND virtual learning. You’ll find Christmas-themed activities for hand strength, pinch and grip, dexterity, eye-hand coordination, bilateral coordination, endurance, finger isolation, 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.
