teletherapy Archives

Spring Emotions Matching Game Slide Deck

March 17, 2021March 12, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

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.

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.

St. Patrick’s Day Writing Slide Deck

March 5, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

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 OTR/L

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 OTR/L

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 OTR/L

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 OTR/L

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.

social emotional activities for kids — Exploring Books Through Play Resource

PreWriting Lines Activity Rainbow Slide Deck

November 13, 2023February 26, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

This rainbow therapy slide deck activity is a prewriting lines activity that can help kids with the visual motor skills needed for writing letters, numbers, and in all aspect of handwriting. Prewriting skills are those very important developmental skills needed before kids can actually write letters or numbers. Pre-writing lines activities are an often-times skipped step of handwriting. That’s why I wanted to create a rainbow drawing art activity that can be used in teletherapy (or face-to-face sessions) that works on this important skill.

You’ll also love these free rainbow therapy slide decks: Rainbow drawing art activity and the rainbow emotions slide decks. Add both to your occupational therapy interventions.

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

Prewriting lines

As we discussed in this blog post on a past pre-writing lines activity, working on pre-writing lines prior to practicing letter formation is an important step for preschool-aged kids, and actually helps to develop a strong basis for proper letter formation.

Establishing pre-writing lines allow kids to strengthen visual motor skills, hand muscles, promote pencil strokes needed for letters, and improve pencil control.

We’ve also previously talked about the progression of pre-writing lines. Prewriting lines development is as follows:

What Are Pre-Writing Skills?

In short, pre-writing skills are the lines and strokes kids need to master and know BEFORE learning how to print the alphabet. Each of these lines is developed in a sequence, based on how old the child is. We’ve covered developmental progression of pre-writing lines previously.

This developmental sequence of prewriting lines is as follows:

Age 1-2: Spontaneous scribbles
Age 2-3: Imitates a vertical line, horizontal line, circle
Age 3-4: Imitates a cross shape, and diagonal lines, a crude square
Age 4-5: Imitates an X, triangle, square

This is a very basic description of ages and developmental progression of line development and pre-writing skills.

As always with child development, each child will progress through this developmental sequence somewhat differently and at different speeds. Some children may draw a square with refined pencil strokes and sharp corners or controlled curves before another child. Other children may form perfectly slanted diagonal lines while others at the same age may make bumpy or curved diagonals.

Still another concern that should be addressed: Older kids may have been introduced to handwriting before they have mastered prewriting lines and then you see the breakdown in letter formation, reversals, inaccuracies with curves, diagonals, line placement, etc. In this case, it is ok to go back and work on these forms in multi-sensory learning strategies. Use sensory bins, rainbow writing, drawing on sandpaper, finger-paint, drawing in shaving cream, etc. to work on accurate copying and forming of these line forms.

This developmental progression of pre-writing lines should be taken as a general outline.

In short, we want to see each of these line formations develop before a child is asked to copy or trace letters.

There are many hands-on activities that help to work on these skills.

This pre-writing lines activity asks kids to form lines with a Wikki Stix border to help children with line placement.
This pre-writing lines leaf activity asks kids to form pre-writing strokes using leaves or other small manipulatives.
This pre-writing lines eraser activity uses the resistive feedback of erasers to work on pre-writing lines.
Writing trays are an excellent way to work on pre-writing lines.

Pre-writing virtual activity

So how do you work on pre-writing skills in a virtual occupational therapy environment? There are many ways!

Copying pre-writing forms can be achieved in teletherapy through creative thinking, use of the camera, and items the child has in the home. To get started on thinking outside the box, check out our free teletherapy with kids mini-course, where you will find loads of information on all things teletherapy, including for those who are at the pre-writing stage in their in their writing and visual motor skills.

Rainbow prewriting lines activity

You can use the slide deck presented here to work on prewriting lines with children, as another virtual therapy activity.

In the free Google slide deck, kids can complete several activities to work on copying pre-writing lines, and they all have a rainbow theme.

prewriting lines rainbow activity for kids

Kids can first copy the prewriting lines with air writing as they point to the lines. Then, they can use whole body movements to air write the forms. This incorporates motor planning, crossing midline, and visual tracking.

In the rainbow therapy slide deck, you’ll find all of the pre-writing lines, including slides for strait vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonal lines, a cross, curves, wiggly lines, arches, a square, a triangle, and more.

teach prewriting lines to kids with a rainbow theme

Finally, children can draw the prewriting forms onto paper.

Want to add this prewriting lines therapy slide deck to your teletherapy toolbox?

Enter your email into the form below and you’ll get access to thsi free Google slide deck.

Color Exercises

January 3, 2023February 19, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

Looking to get kids moving and building skills in therapy sessions or at home? These color exercises use all the colors of the rainbow to help kids move and strengthen gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and even visual motor skills! Add these whole body exercises use colors as a therapy theme, but I love that the colorful exercise activities get kids strengthening muscle groups in big and small ways.

This therapy activity slide deck is one of the many free slides available here on the site, as a resource for teletherapy, home programs, and therapy planning!

Be sure to grab the free I Spy Colors therapy slide deck, too. For a hands-on activity, be sure to use our color by letter worksheet.

Related resource- Working with kids in teletherapy? Need streamlined info on how to structure your sessions? Need activities for week-to-week therapy planning? need answers for all of your teletherapy questions? Join the free teletherapy course, a 5 day email series on telehealth for occupational therapists.

Color exercises

This is a color learning activity, that can be used in teletherapy sessions to develop many skill areas:

Gross Motor Color Exercises

All of these gross motor skill areas can be addressed using the color activities in this slide deck:

Gross motor skills
Core strength
Bilateral coordination
Crossing midline
Core strength
Stability
Balance and equilibrium skills
Coordination
Range of motion
Flexibility
Motor planning
Crossing midline
Movement patterns
Posture and postural control
Muscle tone
Proprioceptive input
Vestibular input

As kids go through the slides, they need to complete various stretches, challenging the skills listed above. There are movement patterns, crossing midline activities, yoga positions, and more. Kids can go through these slides several times if you like, to work on motor planning, sequencing, and memory skills.

Then, the slides ask the child to air write letters. This is an eye-hand coordination activity that incorporates shoulder positioning and strengthening, finger isolation, and crossing midline, motor planning, range of motion.

These slides also work on visual perceptual skills including visual closure as kids identify the hidden letter.

Grade and extend this activity:

Challenge kids by calling out a color and they can complete that gross motor activity.

Having the child air write the letter associated with the color and writing the letter larger or smaller, using whole arm motions, or just the finger.

Challenge kids by calling out a color and asking them to air write the letter.

Or ask kids to complete the air writing task while in the gross motor stretch activity.

Fine Motor Color Exercises

This slide deck challenges fine motor skills as well. Kids can use their finger and work on finger isolation as they write the letters on each of the color slides.

There is another movement section of the slide deck that incorporates colored letters with a fine motor activity. All students will need is a piece of paper (scratch paper works, so tell them to grab an old homework page or even a piece of junk mail) and their hands.

Following the directions on the fine motor activity slides, they will tear the paper into small pieces using their hands to tear and crumble. Tearing paper with the hands and using the finger tips to crumble small bits of paper strengthens the intrinsic muscles of the hands. Here is more information on tearing paper as a fine motor activity.

This activity works on fine motor skills:

Arch development
Intrinsic hand strength
Open thumb web space
Hand strength
Dexterity
Precision
Graded tearing- eye hand coordination
Separation of the sides of the hand

Then, you can extend this activity to use it in different ways or to challenge kids of all levels and ages:

Use different colored paper to match with different letter activities and gross motor exercises in the first part of the slide deck.
Use different grades of paper to make the exercise more difficult. Heavy weight paper like construction paper, cardstock, or paper plates is more of a challenge and lighter weight paper like thing paper, wrapping paper, wax paper, or tissue paper is easier.
Encourage children to use only the very tips of one hand.
Ask kids to write a letter on the small piece of paper and then crumble it up so the letter is hidden.

Visual Motor Exercise with Colors

Finally, the last part of this slide deck is a visual motor exercise. Children can use those small pieces of paper to copy the lines and letters on the slides.

This activity includes strait lines for younger children to incorporate pre-writing lines. There are also letters included for kids working on forming letters.

Extend this activity

Matching letters to the exercises at the beginning of the deck.
Kids could also form letters using the paper balls by memory rather than copying the letter forms.

The slide deck ends with a color self regulation exercise. Kids can choose the color that matches their feelings, alert state, and regulation needs, all with a rainbow color theme!

Virtual Color Exercise Activities

Want this free therapy slide deck? Enter your email into the form below. Grab the free Google slide deck by entering your email into the form below. You will receive a PDF containing a link to open the slide deck. Be sure you are logged into your Google account before clicking the button on that PDF. Save the PDF in your therapy files so you can access this resource any time and share with those on your caseload.

I Spy Colors Activity

January 3, 2023February 19, 2021 by Colleen Beck OTR/L

If you’ve ever played “I Spy with my Little Eye”, then you are going to love this I Spy colors therapy slide deck. It’s a movement activity that gets kids up and moving and challenges several developmental skill areas: visual processing, tactile sensory exploration, handwriting, and strength, endurance, and movement challenges. Kids can go through the free therapy slide deck in an occupational therapy teletherapy session and work on learning colors as well. Add I Spy colors as a color scavenger hunt that kids will love!

Use this along with our color exercises slide deck for more color theme activities in therapy.

This I Spy virtual game is just one of the free slide decks we have available here on the site. You’ll also love our printable color by letter worksheet. Check them all out!

Need more teletherapy resources? Working with kids in teletherapy? Need streamlined info on how to structure your sessions? Need activities for week-to-week therapy planning? need answers for all of your teletherapy questions? Join the free teletherapy course, a 5 day email series on telehealth for occupational therapists.

I Spy Colors

The kids you are working with may have played I Spy before. In a traditional look-and-find game, they need to search a book, puzzle page, or other activity page for hidden items. You may have even played I Spy with my little eye while waiting at a doctor’s office, or in a restaurant. It’s a good activity for kids that keeps them busy. But did you know there are even more therapeutic benefits to this game?

I wanted to create a teletherapy activity that required no materials other than paper and pencil. This I Spy Colors therapy slide deck does the trick.

Therapists can use this free interactive slide deck in therapy treatment sessions virtually as a color scavenger hunt activity.

The activity asks users to search their house for an object of a particular color. By looking around the home for the color detail of objects, children are strengthening several visual perceptual skill areas:

Visual scanning– moving the eyes for a specific aspect of details: colors of objects. Visual scanning is a skill needed for reading as kids scan their eyes over the lines of a page.
Visual discrimination– visually determining differences in colors of objects. The slides ask kids to locate items that are in a range of colors. This color activity is slightly more advanced than just finding a blue item. Can they find teal? Visual discrimination is a skill needed for distinguishing differences in letters and words when reading.
Figure-ground– Pulling out details of objects from a busy background. When users scan their home for a specific color, they are visually identifying objects that may be hidden in a busy background. This visual skill is used in functional tasks every day.
Visual memory– Holding a “picture” of details such as the shade of color in the mind. As kids look throughout their room or home, visual memory is needed to recall the color and shade they are looking for. This visual skill is needed in reading and math.
Visual closure– identifying an object when only parts of it are seen. This visual perceptual skill is used when children locate an object in the room that may be partially hidden. Visual closure is used in reading when readers are able to identify a word by only some of the letters.
Visual convergence– A visual processing skill, this motor task allows vision to shift in scanning. By scanning to near and far points, kids are strengthening this skill. Visual convergence is used in the classroom when scanning from a teacher or the board to the desk, or from near to far and far to near.

Users can then identify features of the object by responding to questions about texture. The slide deck asks about aspects of the found item by asking the child to explore the tactile aspect. Is the item fuzzy? Soft? Rough? How does it feel?

This part of the color activity brings in features of the tactile sensory system.

Virtual I Spy

This virtual I Spy activity takes the fun of the classic look and find game online, making it great for teletherapy activities with kids of all ages. This particular color game goes beyond just “I Spy” however…

Use the virtual activity for working on other areas in therapy, too:

Movement challenges- Kids get up and move to find the objects
Visual perceptual skills- covered above
Tactile sensory exploration and challenges- Can they find a green object that is fuzzy? This activity can be expanded in many ways!
Handwriting- work on skills such as line awareness, letter formation, sizing, legibility. Kids can then self-assess their work, making carryover of writing skills stick.

Users can move the interactive piece of the slide deck to mark off tactile sensory aspects of the colorful item they found.

Finally, there is a color writing activity where users can write a sentence about the object, using the describing words that they selected. This part of the slide deck may be a higher level for some users, but the writing piece invites users to incorporate aspects of language and creative writing into the I Spy Colors activity.

Use this I Spy color activity to teach colors and work on various child development skills, including handwriting.

I Spy Colors for all ages

The slide deck is designed so it meets various levels and can be graded to different ages:

Younger kids can just look for the objects in a color scavenger hunt.
Teach colors, making it a preschool color activity that is perfect for virtual learning.
Some children can skip the tactile sensory aspect and just seek out items in the I Spy portion of the activity.
Grade the activity up by discussing tactile features.
Further grade the activity up by incorporating handwriting. Younger students can just write the word.
Older students can write the word in a sentence, working on adding describing words.
Kids that complete the handwriting portion of the slide deck activity can self-assess their handwriting, using the interactive check marks as they look over their written work.

There’s somethign for everyone with this I Spy Colors therapy activity!

Want to play I Spy Colors?

Grab the free Google slide deck by entering your email into the form below. You will receive a PDF containing a link to open the slide deck. Be sure you are logged into your Google account before clicking the button on that PDF. Save the PDF in your therapy files so you can access this resource any time and share with those on your caseload.

More color activities

Add this slide deck to these hands-on color activities:

Benefits of coloring– Use a couple of crayons to work on many areas of child development.

Visual Motor Color Match Activity– This activity translates wonderfully to virtual therapy sessions. It can be used in face-to-face interventions as well, or as a home activity.

Colored Pencils Handwriting Activities– All you need is a set of colored pencils for working on many skill areas.

Color Mixing Rainbow Write– Work on letter formation and size with this rainbow write activity that challenges kids to mix colors and see what the result is.

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