teletherapy Archives - Page 4 of 8

Flower Visual Motor Therapy Slide Deck

December 8, 2022March 21, 2021 by Colleen Beck

Flower visual motor exercises for therapy

This week’s occupational therapy theme is flowers and so today, I have a free flower visual motor therapy slide deck for you. In this free Google slide deck, you’ll find various aspects of visual motor skill work. With the official start of Spring, flowers are starting to pop up all over, so if the daffodils, lilies, and tulips make you smile, these visual motor flower activities are sure to brighten your therapy session!

Flower visual motor therapy exercises for therapy

Flower visual motor therapy activities

If you are looking for Spring occupational therapy activities to help kids develop skills, this flower visual motor slide deck is it. Add this virtual therapy activity to some hands on flower activities and you’ve got a therapy plan for the week. It’s a great way to make a weekly occupational therapy plan and use the same activities again and again all week, saving yourself time and planning hours. Simply adjust each activity to meet the needs of each child on your therapy caseload to work on their specific goals.

Flower visual motor activities for occupational therapy teletherapy sessions with a free Google slide deck for therapy.

As you know, visual processing breaks down into smaller components that all work together to allow us to take in visual information, process that input, and complete motor operations so we can complete functional tasks. Visual motor skills include eye-hand coordination, visual perception, and visual skills like tracing, convergence, and other skill areas. All of these aspects of visual processing are important parts of performing day to day occupations.

That’s why I created this flower theme therapy slide deck that includes different vison exercises.

In the slide deck, you’ll find pre-writing line activities that ask the user to trace along the forms using a movable flower icon. This eye-hand coordination task requires visual tracking, visual attention, and motor integration with visual input.

Work on visual motor skills with this flower theme slide deck in occupational therapy.

Also, the slide deck includes copying activities. Users can copy the simple and more complex flower forms as they challenge aspects of visual motor skills that are needed for handwriting and math tasks.

There is a handwriting portion as well. Kids can trace the letters on the slide deck using the movable flower piece. This makes the slide deck interactive, as they can work on mouse work, use of a stylus, or finger isolation to trace the flower along the letter. Then, the slide asks them to write words or phrases so they can incorporate handwriting work.

Then finally, the slide deck includes several visual perception activities. Kids can complete each slide, typing or writing out their responses as they work on skills like visual discrimination, form constancy, visual memory, figure-ground, etc. All of these visual perceptual skills play a role in visual motor tasks that we perform on a daily basis.

Free Flower Therapy Slide Deck

Want to add this free slide deck to your therapy toolbox? Use it in teletherapy sessions, home activities to work on visual motor skills and visual processing, and to make therapy planning easier!

Enter your email address into the form below to add this slide deck to your Google drive account.

NOTE- Due to an increase in security measures, many readers utilizing a work or school district email address have had difficulty accessing 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:

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.

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.

Spring Write the Room Slide Deck

March 17, 2021March 12, 2021 by Colleen Beck

Spring write the room activity for handwriting

This Spring Write the Room slide deck is one of our many free slides designed to be used in occupational therapy teletherapy activities. The nice thing about write the room activities is that they can be adjusted to meet the needs of each child…and this handwriting activity is no different!

Write the Room

So what exactly is write the room? Write the room is a writing task that has become more and more popular over the last few years. It’s a handwriting activity that this occupational therapist loves because it works on so many different skill areas:

Handwriting
Letter formation
Copying from near and far points
Visual scanning
Visual attention
Visual memory

Spring write the room activity for teletherapy and virtual sessions and working on handwriting.

In the classroom or home, this might look like cards that are posted around the room. It can be a set of cards that are taped in various locations where kids need to visually scan the room and when they find a card, they copy the words onto their paper. Sometimes, Write the Room activities include a special handwriting page with icons for the child to match to the words so they have to write the word in a specific space on the paper. (Great for spatial awareness and visual memory!)

Write the Room is also a fun way to work on visual scanning, copying from different distances, and visual shift in writing. You can focus on copying the words without missing letters and visual perceptual skills needed to locate the different words in varying planes in a room.

Write the Room for Teletherapy

But in the virtual setting, write the room activities still work really well as a handwriting activity that develops skills!

In the free Google slide deck that is featured this week, kids can go through the slides with their therapist and work on “writing the room” (virtual room that is!)

The virtual write the room activity uses a slide to feature all of the words. The child can copy each word and focus on letter formation, sizing, copying skills, spacing, and overall legibility.

There is a visual memory piece to this teletherapy handwriting activity. One slide includes a blank page where kids can copy the words onto the slide deck, either from memory, or by going back and looking at the icons.

Therapists can lead their students to copy the words onto paper on their desk, too. In this way, they are getting the benefits of a visual shift. This helps to strengthen visual memory and visual attention skills when copying from a vertical plane such as from the chalkboard or from a distance. ids can check over their work to make sure they aren’t missing any letters once they complete the writing task.

Draw the Room Slide Deck

The handwriting activity also includes a ‘draw the room’ activity where children are asked to draw Spring forms like simple flowers, birds, leaves, and other Spring icons.

Copying simple to complex forms strengthens the visual motor skills needed for tasks such as handwriting, math, and other eye-hand coordination tasks.

The slide decks all include a space where kids can “write” right on the actual slide. This is because when you access the free slide deck below, you also get a free Jamboard link. There, kids can use the Google dry erase app to write directly on the screen using a stylus, fingertip, or mouse.

If write the room is a handwriting activity that you would like to try in a face-to-face situation, either in the classroom, in the clinic, or in the home for practice, be sure to grab our Colors Handwriting Pack. It includes write the room cards in upper case letters, lowercase letters, and cursive letters, as well as different handwriting paper sheets.

Colors Write the Room Pages — Write the Room activity with colors is in the Colors Handwriting Kit. Includes lowercase, uppercase and cursive write the room activities.

The Colors Handwriting Pack also includes many other handwriting skills worksheets and activities designed to promote letter formation, legibility in writing, pencil control and so much more.

Free Spring Write the Room Slide Deck

Want to access this free slide deck and work on handwriting in teletherapy sessions with your occupational therapy clients? Enter your email address into the form below and you will receive the free Google slide deck as well as a Jamboard. Let’s write the room AND draw the room for better handwriting skills!

Spring Emotions Matching Game Slide Deck

March 17, 2021March 12, 2021 by Colleen Beck

Emotions Matching game with a bug theme for Spring

Today, I have another free therapy slide deck for you to use in guiding teletherapy occupational therapy sessions. This activity is a Spring themed emotions matching game. The premise behind this emotions game is to help with teaching feelings to kids, as well as the social emotional learning involved in self-regulation. Because there are always other skill areas to work on, the occupational therapy activity addresses visual perceptual skills like visual discrimination and visual memory as well.

This teletherapy slide deck is one of the many free slides we have here on the website. Use them in your teletherapy activities for occupational therapy.

Emotions Matching Game

This emotions matching game is a lot like our other spot it game activities. The idea is to work on teaching emotions by facial expression and to help kids with identifying different facial expressions that translate to feelings and emotions.

This slide deck has a bugs theme, making it a great activity for Spring (but anytime really…bugs are a fun theme to use in occupational therapy activities!)

When kids play this emotions matching activity, they can first, identify different emotions. On the slide deck children can actually type right into the space below each image.

Teach feelings and emotions with this emotion matching game.

The slides are set up so that kids can type the emotion they identify with each facial expression. Some kids might identify different emotions based on the images. Some of the bugs have silly expressions, and others have angry, worried, happy, or calm expressions. When kids go through this part of the emotional learning game, they can express the reasoning why they define each image as a specific feeling or emotion.

When kids identify emotions, it goes a long way in teaching feelings to kids. This can help them with empathy for others and to better understand why and how they feel certain ways in specific situations.

You can extend this part of the activity to further social emotional development and self evaluation. Help kids identify when they may feel that specific emotion, and what they have done about it in the past.

Then, you can help them identify coping strategies if needed (for feelings of anxiousness, worry, or anger) and when feelings get “too big” or out of control. For example, as the child to describe how they might act when they feel that type of feeling. There are so many ways to extend this part of the emotions game that works on an individual basis; Make the social emotional learning online game work for the child you are treating.

These kind of self-reflection strategies are addressed in the Impulse Control Journal, a printable resource for working on responses, coping mechanisms, and self-reflection that impacts our responses to specific situations in everyday situations. With the Impulse Control Journal, kids can journal their responses and identify ways they can respond and react differently in the future.

Emotions Matching Activity

The next part of the slide deck includes a spot it game with the emotions and facial expressions images.

Kids will go through each slide and find two matching facial expression bugs that share the same emotion.

This visual discrimination activity helps with more social emotional skills (picturing the expression in different sizes or positioning) and working memory as it relates to emotional learning. They can recall the emotion that they defined for that particular expression and then go back and identify the self regulation strategies that they came up with in the precious part to the slide activity.

This part of the free slide deck is also interactive- Kids can click on the leaves on the slide and drag them over to cover the matching bugs.

This free social emotional worksheet goes well with this slide deck. Print it off and use it with kids to write in different facial expressions.

Visual Perceptual Skills with Matching Games

When kids play matching games like this spot it activity, they are developing and refining so many visual perceptual skills that carryover to reading, writing, math, handwriting, and other aspects of learning.

These are the visual perceptual skills and visual processing skills that this virtual game addresses:

Visual memory
Visual attention
Visual discrimination
Form constancy
Visual figure ground,
Visual scanning

There are different ways to extend this emotions game as well:

Use it to teach empathy- Identify how others might feel when they have the visual expressions described in this slide deck.
Work on coping strategies- Use the facial expressions to practice coping techniques.
Work on handwriting- write down the emotions and work on letter formation, spacing, sizing, and legibility.
Use the activity as a writing prompt- Kids can write about a time that they experienced one of the emotions on the slide deck. They can describe what led to those feelings and what they did about it if coping tools were needed.

How would you use this emotions game in teletherapy or to guide therapy sessions?

Emotions Slide Deck

Want to add this teaching feelings game to your social emotional skills toolbox? Need easy teletherapy activities that don’t require a ton of materials?

You’ve got it!

Enter your email into the form below. You’ll receive a link to add this slide deck to your Google drive. Then, start using it right away in therapy sessions.

More Social Emotional Tools

Need strategies to work on self-regulation and coping mechanisms? Try the heavy work activity cards for proprioceptive input that calms and helps to regulate.

Or, try the social emotional learning crafts, activities, and play ideas in the resource, Exploring Books Through Play, 50 Activities Based on Books About Friendship, Acceptance, and Empathy.

Emotional Learning information– Use these social emotional learning activities to help children develop positive relationships, teach concepts of behaving ethically, and how to handle challenging emotions and behaviors.

Zones of Regulation Activities– Strategies and hands-on activities to incorporate into self-reflection of feelings, emotions, and our response to situations is the ability to use emotional regulation.

St. Patrick’s Day Writing Slide Deck

March 5, 2021 by Colleen Beck

St. Patrick's Day writing prompts and activities

Another free therapy slide deck in this week’s St. Patty’s Day theme is this St. Patrick’s Day writing activity. It’s an occupational therapy activity that addresses handwriting, legibility, self-correction in writing, and fine motor skills. Sometimes it can be hard to work on handwriting in teletherapy and this activity strives to make that fun and motivating for kids. Use the St. Patrick’s Day writing prompts as activities to get kids started on letter formation, sizing, spacing, and the motor skills needed to hold the pencil with a fun March theme.

This slide deck goes really well with our recent freebies: Four Leaf Clover balance exercises and Shamrock Theme Visual Perception Activities.

All are part of the free slides teletherapy resources here on The OT Toolbox.

St. Patrick’s Day Writing

Working on handwriting isn’t fun for a lot of children. That’s why the slide deck starts off with a writing “ice breaker” activity of sorts. Kids can check out the St. Patrick’s Day items on the slide and try to memorize the items. Then, you can move to the next slide and ask the child to tell you two items that are missing.

This visual constancy exercise is a way to help kids notice details about what they see, and can be a powerful way to work on handwriting accuracy and formation of letters. Use this as a building block to work on self-correcting handwriting mistakes.

When children write, that self-assessment piece is important to legibility and accuracy of writing, so when kids can notice and recall missing information or details, they can self-correct for legibility issues.

As kids go through the slides, ask them to write down the items that are missing. This handwriting activity challenges kids to write without a model, so they are building letter formation skills.

Then, the next slide shows the answer to the missing pieces. Kids can check their letter formation for accuracy and correct letter formation.

St. Patrick's day writing prompt and puzzle

There are two different exercises like this one.

Depending on the child, you can then have them write down all of the St. Patrick’s Day items.

Next, users are asked to write the St. Patrick’s Day words in alphabetical order. This activity challenges visual shift from the vertical plane to the horizontal plane and back again. This skillset is needed for copying material from a blackboard or classroom environment. Putting words into alphabetical order also challenges the visual attention and visual memory needed for reading and math work.

The next several slides of the therapy deck include a fine motor piece where kids are challenged to spell St. Patrick’s Day words in American Sign Language. They will need to visually shift their attention from the word to the sign language sign and form that letter.

Spelling several words with sign language is a fine motor exercise that helps with finger dexterity, precision, finger isolation, arch development, and motor planning skills.

St. Patrick’s Day Writing Prompts

Then, the final piece of the St. Patrick’s Day writing task is to use the words that have been used throughout the slide deck to write sentences. It’s an open-ended St. Patrick’s Day writing prompt that incorporates multisensory learning into the whole lesson.

Encourage kids to self-check their writing for accuracy and to help with carryover of writing skills.

Free Writing and Fine Motor Slide Deck

Add this therapy slide deck to your toolbox. Enter your email into the form below and you will get a copy to use in teletherapy, home programs, or in the classroom.

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.

Click here to get your copy of the Colors Handwriting Kit.

Shamrock Theme Visual Perception Slide Deck

December 8, 2022March 5, 2021 by Colleen Beck

This week’s free therapy slide decks are all about the shamrock theme! This visual perception slide deck covers all things shamrocks and is a fun way to help kids work on skills such as visual discrimination, figure ground, form constancy, visual memory, and visual spatial skills. So, grab this free slide deck and let’s get started!

You’ll want to add the other shamrock themed activities to your therapy toolbox, too: Four leaf clover exercises and St. Patrick’s Day writing activities are sure to round out all of your therapy needs this time of year.

These teletherapy activities are included in our massive collection of free slides, which is growing each week. Be sure to head over there to see the other therapy slide decks you’ve missed.

Shamrock Theme

This time of year, it’s fun to incorporate a shamrock theme into therapy and play. So, when I was thinking of therapy goal areas to address in this week’s slide decks, I knew visual perceptual skills was one of the essential areas.

Visual perceptual skills are important to handwriting, hands-on play, math, reading, learning, and functioning. By visually scanning for differences in details, and being able to pull out visual discriminatory differences, children are building the skills they need for identifying words when reading…noticing different numbers in math problems, recognizing visual information they’ve read or seen before. All of this is connected to learning and functional participation in daily tasks. Read here on visual motor skills to see how all of these parts work together.

So, the shamrock theme visual perception activities take what we know about visual processing, and make fun vision therapy exercises to work on these very skills.

In the shamrock activities, you’ll find several different, but all equally effective vision activities…kind of like vision puzzles!

Find the shamrock

On the first several slides of the therapy activities, you’ll see that users are challenged to count and identify matching shamrocks. These visual discrimination skills are powerful ways to work on form constancy, visual scanning, visual memory, and visual attention. When kids foster these skills, they work on the areas needed for reading and keeping their place in a reading passage. It’s a skill needed for reading fluency and comprehension.

Users can count the number of each shamrock on the board and type that number into the slide deck. Students who are working on handwriting can write the number on paper.

There are two different slides that work on these slills.

You’ll also see a vision exercise where students can click and drag a circle to cover the shamrock that has been flipped. All of the other clovers in the row have been rotated. This form constancy skill is needed when reading so children know that letters are the same, not matter how they are written in different sizes or fonts.

Shamrock activity to work on working memory, spatial relations, and directionality

There is another activity that might be my favorite. This one foster directionality and spatial awareness. Kids can identify the colors of shamrocks that are above, next to, or between others. This activity works on working memory and position in space skills. Teaching spatial relations with direction terms is an important way to help children with spatial awareness in handwriting, body awareness, and laterality.

Other vision activities in the slide deck include a seek-and-find exercise that asks kids to find the four leaf clover hidden in a patch of shamrocks. This activity works on visual scanning, visual figure-ground skills, and visual attention. All of these skills are needed for a child to locate items in a busy background.

Shamrock vision therapy exercise for visual discrimination

There is a shadow matching activity that challenge kids to foster their visual discrimination and visual memory skills.

Shamrock theme visual perception activity for visual scanning

Finally, there is a visual scanning and visual memory activity where kids can scan the shamrocks to find pairs that are the same, within a group. this is a powerful exercise to build skills needed for reading words and letters in a sentence or passage, and can build the skills needed for reading comprehension and fluency.

Free Shamrock Therapy Slide Deck

Want to add this shamrock theme activities to your therapy toolbox? Enter your email address into the form below and you can get a copy for yourself.

Note: this free slide deck is interactive, so there are movable parts on the Google slides. You’ll need to use the slides in edit mode, as the parts won’t be moveable in present mode.

Be sure to make a copy and NOT share the original slides. Other users will be moving the pieces, too so if you don’t make your own copy, you will have pieces that are not in the correct spaces.

Finally, once you go through the slides and move items around, you can easily rest the slides to their original state and start over with another child on your caseload. Simply go to “history” and hit “reset slides” to get the movable pieces back.

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.

Click here to get your copy of the Colors Handwriting Kit.

Four Leaf Clover Balance Exercises

March 4, 2021 by Colleen Beck

This free teletherapy slide deck is a fun one; It’s a visual guide of four leaf clover activities for kids to work on balance and strength. The balance exercises are set up so kids can balance with a bean bag to work on core strength, coordination, stability, and motor planning skills. These balance exercises will get kids moving with St. Patrick’s Day therapy ideas!

Try this four leaf clover exercises to challenge kids balance or use it as a brain break activity for St. Patrick's Day.

Four Leaf Clover Activities

If you need some activities to incorporated into virtual therapy sessions, or a fun brain break in time for St. Patrick’s Day, this four leaf clover activity is it.

Like all of our free virtual therapy slide decks, this gross motor workout encourages kids to move and develop skills, with a fun theme.

4 leaf clover activity includes a deep breathing activity and balance exercises.

Kids can start with the deep breathing warm up activity, using the clover image. Kids can start by taking deep breaths in and out and following the directions on the 4 leaf clover image.

Deep breathing exercises are a powerful way to achieve a calm-alert state, so that children are ready to learn and participate in therapy. This self-regulation benefit, along with the mindfulness and relaxation benefits makes this four leaf clover breathing exercise a great way to start any therapy session.

You can get a printable version of this four leaf clover deep breathing exercise here on our site. It includes a coloring page, too, so if that would add to your therapy session, be sure to print that off as well.

Use these four leaf clover exercises for balance and sensory input.

Next, kids can move onto the balance exercises. Kids can use a bean bag or a pillow with each exercise to really challenge balance and coordination.

For kids in virtual therapy, a bean bag may not be available. In that case, kids can balance with a pillow in the place of the clover images. Other ideas include using rolled up socks or a stuffed animal.

Each slide deck moves kids through a set of exercises to incorporate core strength and stability, movement changes, inverted positioning, and motor planning challenges. By completing the 4 leaf clover exercises, kids are also gaining vestibular, and proprioceptive sensory input.

Free 4 Leaf Clover Slide Deck

Want a copy of this free therapy slide deck?

Enter your email address into the form below and this slide deck will be sent to your email. You can make a copy onto your Google drive and then use it in teletherapy sessions, in home programming, or as a classroom brain break activity.

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.

Click here to get your copy of the Colors Handwriting Kit.

Rainbow Drawing Slide Deck

February 23, 2023February 26, 2021 by Colleen Beck

This rainbow art drawing help kids with visual motor skills of copying images and figures. When kids demonstrate the ability to copy shapes and forms, they are building the skills needed for copying words, letters, and sentences. This rainbow slide deck is a teletherapy activity that helps with visual motor skills needed for handwriting. Add this free Google slide deck to your occupational therapy teletherapy services (or home programs) and start building skills in visual motor integration.

Starting with drawing milestones is a good idea, especially if you are wondering about using this rainbow drawing activity with a range of ages.

This therapy virtual activity is great to use along with some fruit loop rainbow craft ideas for hands-on rainbow themed fun.

Rainbow Drawing Art

If you take a scroll on YouTube, you’ll find a lot of directed drawing videos that walk kids through “how to draw a rainbow”… or how to draw hundreds of other images, cartoons, and drawing art ideas.

But, one thing that I have been looking for is simple forms that help kids with visual motor skills like copying simple and complex shapes…that are FUN and motivating.

Here’s the thing: when kids copy shapes, they are developing so many visual motor integration skills that translated to forming letters and numbers, copying sentences, and the eye-hand coordination needed to move a pencil in the way it needs to move so that letters and numbers are placed on lines. It’s all connected!

Copying simple lines and shapes are part of pre-writing skills. By the way, be sure to grab this rainbow pre-writing lines Google slide deck. It’s a freebie that you’ll want for your younger or lower level kiddos.

AND, when kids progress to copying more complex shapes, drawings, and forms, they are developing stronger skills in moving the pencil accuracy, spatial awareness, line awareness, and position in space. All of these skill sets are so necessary for handwriting.

Draw a Rainbow Activity

Kids can copy the different basic rainbow forms and develop these skills using our free rainbow drawing slide deck.

Each slide includes simple or more complex rainbow drawings that challenge kids to copy forms, making this a fun Spring activity that helps to build visual motor skills.

You can ask kids to copy the rainbows onto paper in different ways to extend this activity:

Ask kids to copy the shape in a specific space.
Ask kids to fold their paper into columns and rows. They can copy a rainbow form into each space on the paper.
Ask the child to copy the rainbow in a very large size on a dry erase board or large chalk board to use whole body movements and crossing midline. Air writing is another option.
Copy the forms with different sensory materials: chalk, water colors, paint, rainbow writing, writing on sandpaper, etc.
Copy the rainbow form from memory.
Copy the forms in a very small size.
Copy the forms into a sensory writing tray. Here are ideas for sensory writing trays.

Want this Rainbow Visual Motor Activity?

Enter your email into the form below to access this free Google slide deck.

Emotion Matching Game Slide Deck

February 26, 2021 by Colleen Beck

Today, I’ve got a fun emotion matching game that you can use in teletherapy sessions to teach emotions and feelings. This social emotional learning activity is an online game that kids will love to use in virtual therapy while working on things like identifying facial expressions as well as the visual perceptual skills like visual discrimination, visual scanning, and form constancy.

Emotion Matching Game

If working on emotions in a spot it game is helpful in your occupational therapy interentions, this emotions matching game will do the trick.

Emotion game to teach facial expressions and emotions to kids

Kids can work through the slides and first, identify emotions based on facial expressions of the stars on each rainbow star.

There is a text box under each facial expression where users can type the name of the facial expression.

Next, kids can work through each slide to identify the matching emotions. There are only two facial expressions that match on each slide and kids can move the clouds over to cover the matching emotions.

This slide deck covers a variety of skill areas:

Visual scanning
Visual form constancy
Visual discrimination
Visual attention
Visual memory
Social emotional learning
Identifying emotions
Eye hand coordination
Typing skills
Computer mouse skills

Identifying and expressing emotions through play is an important part of social emotional development. This game offers an oppourtunity to work on these skills in virtual therapy sessions.

For more ways to work on emotion matching, try these activities and resource pages:

Want to add this emotion matching game to your therapy toolbox?

Enter your email address into the form below and you’ll receive this Google slide deck game.

Google Slide Deck TIPS:

Save the PDF file that you receive once you enter your email below, 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.
You will be prompted to make a copy of the slide deck. Before clicking that, be sure that you are logged into your Google account.
Make a copy for each student’s Google Drive. When you share it, make sure you enable edit capabilities for users.
The pieces will be moveable in “edit” mode. If you click “present”, the movable ice cubes won’t work.
Be sure to make a copy of this slide deck and not change the url to indicate “edit” at the end. When you make a copy of the slide deck onto your Google drive, you will end up with your own version that you are free to adjust in order to meet your student’s needs. By changing the url to “edit”, you can potentially mess up the original version that many other therapists and The OT Toolbox users are given.
To easily start a new game- Once you’ve gone through all of the slides, go to “history” on the top of the Google dashboard. You will be able to revert the slide to it’s original state using the history option, so all of the ice cubes go back to their original place. The history option is located on the top dashboard by clicking the link that says, “last edit was…”. When you click on that, you will see a list of edits made on the right side of your screen. Click on the edit titled, “New Game (Revert slides to their original state)”. This should move all of the movable ice cubes back to their original location on the slide deck. The typed in emotions on the text boxes will disappear as well. Note that you can delete edits from that list, so if several students are using the slides, you can keep the organization simple and delete edit versions that you no longer need.

MORE Emotions Games and Activities

Want to help kids explore social and emotional learning through play? Exploring Books Through Play inspires social and emotional development though play based on children’s books. The specifically chosen books explore concepts such as differences, acceptance, empathy, and friendship.

Exploring Books Through Play: 50 Activities Based on Books About Friendship, Acceptance and Empathy is filled with hands-on activities rooted in interactive, hands-on, sensory play that focus on creating a well-rounded early childhood education supporting growth in literacy, mathematics, science, emotional and social development, artistic expression, sensory exploration, gross motor development and fine motor skills. Kids can explore books while building specific skills in therapy sessions, as part of home programs, or in the home.

Click here to explore acceptance, empathy, and friendship through play.

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Flower visual motor therapy activities

Free Flower Therapy Slide Deck

Flower Visual Motor Activities Slide Deck!

Spring Fine Motor Kit

Write the Room

Write the Room for Teletherapy

Draw the Room Slide Deck

Free Spring Write the Room Slide Deck

Free Spring Write the Room Slide Deck

Emotions Matching Game

Emotions Matching Activity

Visual Perceptual Skills with Matching Games

Emotions Slide Deck

Spring Emotions Game Slide Deck!

More Social Emotional Tools

St. Patrick’s Day Writing

St. Patrick’s Day Writing Prompts

Free Writing and Fine Motor Slide Deck

St. Patrick’s Day Writing and Fine Motor Activity

Shamrock Theme

Find the shamrock

Free Shamrock Therapy Slide Deck

Shamrock Theme Visual Perception Exercises!

Four Leaf Clover Activities

Free 4 Leaf Clover Slide Deck

Four Leaf Clover Balance Exercises!

Rainbow Drawing Art

Draw a Rainbow Activity

Want this Rainbow Visual Motor Activity?

Rainbow Art Drawing Visual Motor Skills Slide Deck!

Emotion Matching Game

Emotion Matching Game Slide Deck!

MORE Emotions Games and Activities

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Emotions Game Slide Deck!