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visual motor skills

Visual Scanning Activities

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visual scanning activities

These Visual Scanning activities support the essential visual skill needed for functional tasks. Here, we are covering specific strategies to support the ability to scan during daily tasks, all through play-based visual processing activities. Related, is this resource on scanning activities for reading, which is a very functional occupation and a part of learning impacted by reading.

Visual Scanning Activities

First, it’s important to cover what visual scanning is.

Visual scanning is an essential part of so many functional skills.  What is visual scanning?  When you’re reading a line of text in a book, you shift your eyes left to right across the page without losing your place. 

When you get to the end of the line, you shift your eyes down to the next line without jumping your vision all over the page.  Without this ability, reading would be quite difficult!

Read more to find activities to support this visual skill including visual scanning games, visual scanning occupational therapy activities, and other visual scanning exercises that teachers, therapists, and parents can use to develop the skills kids need!


Try this fun and easy visual scanning activity.

Other areas where visual scanning is important: watching a moving target such as following the ball in sports, completing mazes and word searches, cutting shapes with scissors, tracing lines, spacing letters in handwriting, and so much more.

These features are great ways to practice visual scanning skills in a fun and creative way.



Visual Scanning Activities

 

Kids will love these visual scanning activities to use in occupational therapy activities. They are creative and fun ways to work on visual scanning to improve reading and comprehension skills.
 

 

 

 
Visual scanning for words

Sight Word Blast Off Game from There’s Just One Mommy~ In this activity, encourage your kids to scan the page with just their eyes.  Prompt them to keep their head still as they move their eyes to scan for letters and words.

Match colors and sort for visual scanning activities

Seek and Sort Color Game from Where Imagination Grows~  Scanning for objects is a great way to practice visual motor skills.

Color matching games are great for visual scanning activities

Color Pattern Matching Game from The Connection We Share~ Scanning for colors and patterns practices those skills needed for functional tasks like handwriting.

Visual scanning printables

Dot Printables from Tot Schooling~  Filling in the dots requires eye-hand coordination, which is an essential part of visual motor skills.

Looking for more visual scanning activities for the kids?  Try some of these:

 

 


 
 

More Visual Scanning Activities you will love: 

Play Dough Color Match Learning Activity

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Play dough is such a fun way to play and learn.  We are big fans of the fine motor fun to be had with play dough.  In fact, we’ve done other fine motor color matching activities with play dough before.  Color matching with play dough is a fun way for preschoolers and toddlers to learn colors and so much more.
 This play dough activity was great for the Toddler age range.  Learning colors, matching, sorting, and fine motor work were all involved.  Baby Girl was a big fan!  

Color matching and learning activity for Toddlers and Preschoolers

 

 {This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts}  
Kids can identify colors of play dough.

Color identification activity for Toddlers

We started with a bunch of colors of play dough.  We used modeling dough, but you could also make your own play dough for learning and play.   We worked on naming all of the colors of the play dough.
Kids can work on many fine motor skills with play dough and paper clips.

Color matching activity for Toddlers

I pulled out a bunch of colored paper clips
and showed Baby Girl how to press them into the matching color.  She did pretty well with the matching of colors.  The identification is a little harder for her.  She’ll name some of the colors but stumble on others.  (Baby Girl is 2.5 years old).  She’s getting there, though!  I love that she loves activities like this.  She was really into it.

 

I love the colors of this dough!

 

Fine Motor Activity for Toddlers, Preschoolers, and School-aged Children

Pressing those paper clips into the dough requires a tripod grasp.  The resistance of the dough is a great way to strengthen the hand, especially the arches of the hand.  This is so important for manipulating objects in self-care tasks like buttoning.  This is a great pre-handwriting activity, too.  Definitely, it’s a good warm-up activity for kids who are at the writing stage.  Pressing those paper clips into the dough would get the hand “awake” and ready for a coloring or handwriting task for older kids.  I would recommend this activity for the school aged range, too.

Picking up paper clips from a flat surface is a great way to work on fine motor skills.

Picking up the paper clips from a flat surface like the table is a great way to work on finger dexterity with children.  You’ll need a tip to tip grasp to pick up the paper clip and manipulate it within your hand.  What a work out for those little hand muscles!  In-hand manipulation is essential for tasks like managing coins, rotating a pencil in handwriting tasks, putting small objects like pegs into peg boards, and so much more.  Scatter those paper clips around the table…this is a great way to play and work on fin motor skills!

Toddlers can work on fine motor skills with play dough.

If you’re doing this activity with a younger child, be sure to keep a close eye on them.  As always, use your judgment in what works best for your child or group of children in a school setting.  The paper clips could be a choking hazard of course so if you are working with kids who may put them in their mouth, either work on one clip at a time or put this activity away for a few months.  Better yet, pin it to your Pinterest boards for safe remembering 😉

How many other ways can you think of to make this activity a learning opportunity?  Try sorting the paper clips by color or size.  Pattern the colors of dough or paper clips.  Count the paper clips as your child presses them into the dough.  Ask him or her to press a certain number of clips into each dough ball.  Sequence the number of paper clips that you’ve pressed into the dough.  There is SO much learning happening here!

Looking for more play dough activities?  We’ve been having a blast pinning to our play dough, clay, goop, and more board:

Why You Need Bunny Tongs for Developing Scissor Skills

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Bunny tongs activity for fine motor skills

When I worked as an Occupational Therapist with pediatrics, I did a ton of work on scissor skills and pre-scissor skills. It was one of my favorite things to work on with school-based kiddos. There was an item in my therapy bag that I (and the kids) LOVED for scissor practice: bunny tongs. These are a great Easter activity for occupational therapy sessions, but we actually use them all year round. Here’s my OT tip: if you see a pair of these bunny tongs in the egg-dying section of stores around Easter time, GRAB THEM!

You’ll also want to check out our other Bunny Activities:

Bunny Tongs for Scissor Skills

Now being at home with my own kids, it’s so much fun to pull out my OT stash of supplies and play.  We pulled out a few things recently and the kids had a blast playing.  And if you follow this blog, you know we do a ton of fine motor activities! 

This is the ONE item you want to pick up from the Dollar Store this spring.  It’s a must-have for OTs working in the schools or with kids on scissor skills.

You’ll want to check out our resource on how to hold scissors for more tips on the grasp aspect. The one thing I love about using the bunny tongs as a tool to support scissor skills is that it is a fun way to work on the mechanics of holding scissors.

 
 
Beginner scissor skills using bunny tongs
 

Scissor Skills with Tongs

 
If you see these Bunny Tongs at the store this Spring, GRAB them up!  These are awesome for scissor skills and besides being completely cute, they are SO fun to play with. 
 
Adorable bunny + working on developmental skills= AWESOME!
 
These bunny tongs are out this time of year because they are really intended for dipping Easter eggs. 
 
We’ve never actually used them for egg dying, but I’m guessing it’s a pretty cool way to dye eggs, too.  I did find them on amazon (affiliate link), so if you can’t find these guys in the store, they are always available online. 
 
New scissor users will love to sort and manipulate crafting pom poms with bunny tongs.

I set up this sorting activity for the kids one day using our bunny tongs.  Scissor skills were really worked on with the repetition of picking up lots of assorted pom poms and sorting them into crates.

Bunny tongs for working on scissor grasp in young kids
 
Baby Girl LOVED this activity. She went through and sorted pom poms at least three separate times.  You can see how she’s got her ring finger and pinkie finger extended out as she opens the tongs in the picture above. 
 
This is a great time to work on pre-scissor skills with her, so that as she does start with snipping with real scissors down the road, she maintains an appropriate and effective grasp on the scissors.
 
Tuck a crafting pom pom into the palm of the hand to improve scissor skills.

Tuck a small object into the hand when using the bunny tongs to work on grasp on scissors.

Tips for Cutting with Scissors

Not a great picture, but popping a crafting pom pom into the palm of her little hand is a great way to correct that grasp on the tongs (or scissors).  This way, the child opens and closes the tongs/scissors with the thumb and pointer/middle fingers in an effective and more controlled manner.  This will help with scissor control and line awareness.

If you’ve got a little one who cuts with scissors and snips all over the place, with their pinkie finger and ring finger extended out as they open the scissors, try this trick. 

You can use any small item like a little eraser or pebble in the palm of their hand.  It’s a good physical prompt to remind them to keep their hand closed as they cut with scissors.

Kids can sort and manipulate crafting pom poms to work on beginner scissor skills.

Little Guy wanted in on this action too, and once Big Sister came home from school, she sorted the pom poms too.  This was just fun!

Kids can sort pom poms using tongs for fine motor play

Baby Girl resorted to just using her hands to sort later in the day.  Still great for color matching and identification.   we’ll definitely be doing this activity again.  It was a huge hit for my kids as much as it was a hit for all of the school-based clients I’ve worked with over the years.  It’s the cuteness of that bunny!

Spring Fine Motor Kit

Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!

Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:

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

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

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

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

Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.

Glass Gems on the Light Table

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We made our own colorful glass gems to use on a light table for a sensory activity and creative painting activity. These glass gems are fun to make and build fine motor skills.

Glass Gems

Do you have a light box or ever used one?  It’s a super cool way to play, learn, and explore.  We’ve done an attempt at a DIY light box before but weren’t too happy with the long term results of it. 

It worked well for tracing and handwriting practice, checking out a few cool manipulatives on the lights, but…well, you can read about our thoughts in the end.  We wanted to try another attempt and so this time, we did something just as simple and easy, but it worked WAY better. 

That post should be up this week.  For now, we wanted to share what we’ve been playing with on the light box.  Our own DIY colored glass gems!

 
 


 
Create your own colored glass gems easily for learning, decor, and play.

 

DIY Glass Gems

These cuties were very easy to make and VERY fun to play with.  We’ve been sorting, counting, patterning, and making shapes with our colored gems and on the light box, do they ever look awesome!

 

Use your colored glass gems on the light table for learning and play.

 

 

Check out that light shining through our gems!  WOW!  Seriously, this was so cool.  So, how did we make these gorgeous gems??

 

Create your own colored glass gems in any color for decor, learning, and play
 
Amazon affiliate links are included below.
 
We started out with a pile of assorted colored tissue paper
cut into little squares.   
 
You’ll also need a bunch of clear large glass gems. 
 
We used the 1 and 1/4″ sized gems that are flat on one side.  We found them in the dollar store but the are also available in the link above. 

 

Create your own colored glass gems for learning and play

 

Add a little bit of glue with some water and mix together with a paint brush.

 

Next, trace your gems onto a piece of tissue paper.  I cut out a whole stack at once and it worked well to cover each gem.  A pretty princess pencil makes it more fun 😉

Creating your own colored glass gems is a great activity for kids

 

Baby Girl helped with the next part.  She painted the glue mixture onto the flat side of each gem while I stuck the tissue paper on.

Make your own colored glass gems for learning and play.

 

They are starting to look pretty fun!

colored glass gems for play and learning. These are easy and fun to make your own colors!

 

Once the glue dried, we started playing!  We didn’t even pull out the light box yet.  Just playing with these colored stones on the table was fun.  These would be so pretty in a flat dish with a Spring centerpiece or perfect for math activities.  We sorted, stacked, made shapes, counted, named colors…how many ways can you think of to play and learn with colored gemstones? 

 

Visual Motor Activity for Learning and Scanning, Eye-hand Coordination

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We shared a great bubble wrap activity yesterday and are continuing again today with another fun learning through play activity with the awesomeness of bubble wrap!   This time we did some visual scanning to work on letters of Little Guy’s name, letter sounds (a great pre-reading activity!), color awareness with Baby Girl, and eye-hand coordination as we popped the bubbles.  Sounds like a super fun way to play and learn, right?!?
Visual Motor activities are very important to the pre-hand writer…and new handwrites, too.  Learning to place those letters on the lines and be aware of how much space is left on the page is part of visual-motor skills.  So is line awareness when cutting.  And even, moving with large muscles as we carry items in the home or classroom.  We have to be aware of how much space is around us and this is where visual-motor awareness comes into play.  
Visual scanning (scanning with the eyes across a page, for example) and hand-eye coordination (using the hands in a coordinated manner based on what the eyes are telling us) are both part of Visual Motor Skills.  Visual Motor activities are a fun way to play while working on these important skills.


This visual motor activity is a great way to work on visual scanning, eye-hand coordination, and letter and color awareness.

 

Visual Motor Activity to work on visual scanning and hand-eye coordination

We started our fun with these funny faces stickers from www.craftprojectideas.com/.  We received them free of charge and have been loving the silly faces in our crafts.  The colors were perfect for this activity.  Baby GIrl stuck the stickers onto a piece of paper and together we worked on colors.  She can tell me some of the colors, but most of the time, needs help.  These stickers were a fun way to practice!
Kids can work on color awareness with colored stickers in this visual motor activity.
{Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}
Once the stickers were in place, I taped a piece of bubble wrap on top of the stickers.  Now we were ready to get to popping!
Preschoolers will love locating and identifying letters in their name as they visually scan.
Little Guy used a Window Marker
to dot the colored stickers as I called out a color. 

  

Use window markers and scan for colors, letters
He had to visually can the paper to locate the color he needed.  Pushing hard enough with the marker provided a nice “pop” when he dabbed the bubble.  Using his hands in a coordinated way to dab the correct bubble worked on hand-eye coordination.  Because of the bubble wrap on top of the stickers, he had to make sure it was aligned correctly.

Children can visually scan for letters and develop eye-hand coordination to locate letters.
Next, we tried this with the letters in his name.  I had extra letters, plus the letters in his name and asked him to dab all of the ones that he needed for his name.  Scanning across the page in all directions was fun way to explore letter identification as he visually scanned top to bottom and side to side.  He again worked on those hand-eye coordination skills as he popped the correct bubbles.
More playful ways to practice hand-eye coordination and visual scanning :

Soda Dough Snowmen Sensory Bin

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Did you see our Soda Dough Snowmen post from last week?  We’ve been using our snowmen in all kinds of pretend play with loads of imagination!  They came in handy one day for this Soda Dough Snowmen Sensory Bin. This is a Winter sensory bin that supports fine motor skills and tactile sensory input.

Snowman Sensory Bin

We love this snowman sensory bin because you can involve kids in several aspects of setting up and playing with the sensory bin:

  • Making the fake snow
  • Molding the fake snow into snowmen
  • Manipulating and exploring items in the snowman sensory bin
Sensory Bin with Soda Dough Snowmen
We loved creating this snowman sensory bin on a cold winter day.
Items that you can add to a snowman sensory bin include:
  • Container
  • Cotton balls
  • Tinsel
  • Cotton batting
  • Gems or other small objects and items to manipulate and explore
Child manipulating loose parts in a sensory bin with Soda Dough Snowmen

Loose Parts in Sensory Bins

We used cotton batting left, cotton balls, our soda dough snowmen, bits of tinsel, and some glass gems.  A few clothes pins were added for fine motor exploring, too.  This was a fun little world for Baby Girl with loose parts.  All those little pieces are fun to explore and examine. 

Language is developed.  As your child plays, ask her questions.  “What color is that?” “What can we do with this?” What is this called?”  Their imagination will blossom and learning is encouraged.  You can add colors, scents, textures to sensory bins with little loose parts pieces.

Hand Strengthening with Clothes Pins

Pinching items with clothes pins is a great way to strengthen the intrinsic muscles of the hands.  Strength in the arches of the hands is needed for endurance with coloring and handwriting.  Starting in the toddler years with fine motor strengthening activities is a fun way to play and work on pre-handwriting skills.   Not to mention, it’s just fun!

Looking for more sensory bin ideas?  Check out our Sensory Play page for lots of fun activities!

Playful Ways to Learn the Alphabet

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This week on Share It Saturday, we are highlighting Playful Ways to Learn the Alphabet.  We love to create unique learning experiences for our kids.  Not only is it a great way to encourage participation and develop multiple skills, it’s just fun!  Learning letters (and the whole alphabet) in a playful way ensures retention of letter formation, the order of the ABC’s, and encourages children to actively ENJOY learning letters and pre-reading skills!  Learning the alphabet in a playful way can be fun with a little creativity.  Check out the links below for awesome ways to Play and learn the alphabet!
This post contains affiliate links. 
Playful Ways to Learn the Alphabet by Sugar Aunts


Playful Ways to Learn the Alphabet

DIY Montessori Moveable Alphabet from Moms Have Questions Too
Letter Learning with Bottle Caps 
Tracing Letters Handwriting Practice 
Squish and Seek Sight Words from Playdough to Plato
Letter Learning with Dyed Alphabet Pasta
Musical Letters from Reading Confetti
Golf Tee Letter Hammering
Letter Ice Muffins
Alphabet Chicka Chicka Book Boom Tree from Adventures At Home With Mum
Magnetic Letters on the Garage Door

Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds

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Playing with Pumpkin seeds and Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds were something I thought about as soon as we carved our jack-o-lanterns this year.  We sorted the seeds into a super sensory playing activity that ended up having a great learning component too!  We ended up using our dyed pumpkin seeds in so many playful ways over the last few weeks.  We’ve sorted, created patterns, made collage art, and more.  We will definitely be dying (as well as roasting) our pumpkin seeds every year from now on!
Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds
(Note: This post contains affiliate links.  That means we receive monetary compensation when purchases are made through the links on this blog.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected. As always, we thank you for your support and community on Sugar Aunts.)

Have you ever dyed pumpkin seeds before?  This was our first time, so it was a learning experience.  And, we haven’t even made too many batches of roasted seeds either that we LOVED.  We posted the question to our Facebook page asking for roasted seed recipes.  We got some great replies and ended up trying  a little dying and a little roasting!

(we roasted our seeds for eating with a little olive oil, salt, and paprika.  Perfection!)

To dye the seeds, I put a handful of dry seeds in a plastic baggie and added a few drops of food coloring.  All it took was a few shakes of the bag to cover the seeds.  I wasn’t sure if vinegar would be needed to get the dye to “stick” to the seeds, but it seemed to work ok without.  A few kiddos enjoyed shaking baggies (and jumping around the house with them…)!  We made blue, yellow, and green…only because those were the colors of liquid food dye I had on hand.  Once they were covered with color, we poured the seeds onto a cookie sheet covered with paper towels and let them dry. 

Drying required a full 24 hours and a couple of re-scattering to make sure all of the seeds were uncovered.  Once they were dry, we were ready to play!

Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds

Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds

This was a great activity for Baby Girl and Little Nephew (both 2 years old).  I had this set up one day after the kids woke up from their naps.  A few of our The First Years 4 Pack Take And Toss Spill Proof Cups
were perfect to match the colors of our seeds. 

Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds

They had so much fun with this!  Little Nephew really enjoyed this activity.  He played for a long time sorting the seeds (and a lot of not sorting, too…just dropping the seeds into cups).

Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds
There were a lot of hands involved in this activity.  It was a good thing we had three different colors  and cups!
Watch this space to see what else we did with our colorful pumpkin seeds!

Fine Motor Pincer Grasp Color Match

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This fine motor pincer grasp activity uses colored beads to work on fine motor skills while kids color match beads to play dough. When threading beads onto dry pasta (or skewers, toothpicks, or other “sticks”) stuck into play dough, children improve various skills necessary for pencil grasp and functional grasp.  Use this simple fine motor activity to improve visual motor skills, pincer grasp, in-hand manipulation, separation of the sides of the hand, and more.
This was a fun play time activity for the little ones in our house.  We had fun with fine motor play while working on colors, matching, and fine motor skills.


use play dough and beads to help kids with color matching while addressing fine motor skills like pincer grasp, in-hand manipulation, separation of the sides of the hand and other visual motor skills.

Fine Motor Pincer Grasp Color Match Activity

Play dough is such a great learning tool.  The kids always love when play dough is pulled out.  This one took two colors and some spaghetti noodles.  We’ve seen lots of examples of this type of activity around the web, and love the inspiration from Mess For Less.  Instead of stacking cereal on our spaghetti noodles, we went with colored beads and two colors of play dough.

I put two colors of play dough on a plastic tray and stuck some dry spaghetti noodles into the dough.  Scatter some beads around and we are ready to play!  I put a few beads onto the same-colored dough to show an example of matching the colors.
Baby Girl and Little Niece and Nephew (both newly 2 years old) LOVED this!  They really astonished me that they could match the colored beads right away to the correct dough.
They really got into this activity.  There were hands everywhere for a while, reaching for beads and noodles!

Pincer Grasp

What made this a great activity for the littlest ones was the pincer grasp that they worked on when picking up the beads.  They had to manipulate the beads within their hand to get the bead onto the thin noodle. 
Pincer grasp is using the thumb and index finger to pick up small items.  This grasp is important for development when children are holding a string to thread in lacing tasks or for managing a button.  These two little ones didn’t care much about how they were holding the bead…They just knew they were having fun 🙂

Color Match with Play Dough

This was such a fun activity for our little ones.  Loads of learning happening here!  Colors, matching, sorting, even patterns for the older ones.  Baby Girl and Little Nephew really got excited about the colors.  They would say “purple!” and “green!” Not necessarily for the correct colors, but it was pretty fun…and cute 🙂

Have you done a version of the noodles in play dough activity?   We’ll be doing this again for sure with all the fun we had!

Looking for more Fine Motor activities?  You might love these:
Fine Motor Play with Tissue Paper
Tripod Grasp with Wikki Stix
Pipe Cleaner Fun
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