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visual perception

Glitter Letter Manipulatives for Learning

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letter manipulatives
These DIY letter manipulatives were very easy to make.  The kids and I have been playing with these letters for a few weeks now.  We love playing with learning elements and we’ve done a lot of letter identification activities.  This one was fun to make and for playing!
 

Letter Manipulatives

Letter manipulatives are a hands-on tool for supporting letter identification in young kids. This is a great preschool activity that can be used as a pre-writing activity. Helping kids to identify letters with alphabet manipulatives supports early literacy skills. 

Alphabet manipulatives like the ones we made below are fun for helping kids to match uppercase and lower case letters, too. 

They can be used in handwriting tasks or as a writing prompt while working on letter formation. 

Use these letter manipulatives in several ways:

  • In sensory bins
  • In an I Spy game
  • With writing trays
  • In play dough
DIY letter match manipulatives with glass gems. These are great for letter identification, matching, memory games, pre-reading.
 

 

 
This post contains affiliate links. 

 


How to Make Letter Manipulatives

This letter learning activity was a lot like our DIY color glass gems.  They are so much fun for sorting, patterning, play on the DIY light box.  We used a similar manner to make these glitter letters. These large glass gems are great for play and learning.  We’ve written letters and shapes on them, and painted them, created art with them.

If you haven’t made your own DIY decoupage, this is one thing you need to try.  We use this stuff all the time.

 

 

 
Paint the flat side of the glass gems with decoupage.  Cover with glitter.

 

 
Shake off the excess glitter.  Coat with another layer of decoupage.

 

 
Stick on letter stickers and cover with another thin coat of decoupage.
 
 
Let those beauties dry.

 

 
When the letters were dry, we played letter memory, sounded out the sounds of the letters, and matched the letters.  This is a great way to play and learn letter identification, letter sounds, pre-reading, visual scanning skills, and more.

 

 
We haven’t tried putting the letter manipulatives on the light table yet, but I think they will look great!
 

More Ways to Use letter manipulatives

 
Word building with letter blends
Sensory letter play
Playful ways to learn the alphabet

 

Letters Fine Motor Kit
Letters Fine Motor Kit

Work on letter formation, letter identification and handwriting skills with our Fine Motor Letter Kit! Perfect for hands-on letter learning.

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.

Baked Cotton Balls Ten Apples Up On Top

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Did you ever do an activity with the kids that was such a hit, that the kids ask to re-do the activity over and over and over again?  This one is it for us.  There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t hear about our smashing apples activity. Especially if we happen to see a hammer.  Oh, this baked cotton ball activity was a fun one for us! 
 
We’ve never made baked cotton balls before, but have had the idea bubbling for a while.  When we heard that the Preschool Book Club‘s book for this week would be Ten Apples Up on Top, we knew it would have to be an apple themed baked cotton ball activity.  We even made these waaaay before all of the other book activities in the second series of books.  Like back in June.  If you’ve never made baked cotton balls before, this is a MUST-DO activity!
This post contains affiliate links.  


How to make Baked Cotton Balls:

First read Ten Apples Up On Top! by Dr. Seuss.  This is such a fun book for counting and playing along with the story.
Begin by mixing together one cup of flour and one cup of water.  This is a great activity for the kids.  Scooping, stirring, direction following, sneak tasting (my kids aren’t the only ones who go crazy for flour, right!??)
 
Pour in a bunch of red food coloring.  We typically go with Wilton gel colors for all of our dying activities, but I knew I wanted a really deep red color.  It seems like red coloring requires SO much dye to get a good shade of red.  I ended up using a bottle from the dollar store and used about half of the bottle of food dye.  This was maybe 20 drops?  Add enough to get a nice red color.
 
Mix in the food coloring.
Now is the cotton ball part.  Grab up your stash of cotton balls.
Mix them around to coat all of the cotton balls.  
Place a layer of aluminum foil on a baking tray and place the cotton balls on the tray for baking.  I used two forks to pick up the coated cotton balls and was able to let excess flour coating drip off before placing the cotton balls onto the foil. You’ll want to let as much excess drip off before putting them on the sheet to avoid the sharp edges and flat bottom once the cotton balls bake.
 
Pop the baking sheet into the oven for around 60 minutes at 300 degrees F.
 
While the cotton balls are baking, snip up the leaves and stems for the apples.  We used brown pipe cleaners and green crafting foam that we received from www.craftprojectideas.com.
When the apples are done, pull them out of the oven and let them cool for a bit. They will be nice and hard.  You’ll need to snip the bottom edges of the apples to remove any sharp edges that dripped to the base before baking.
 
To attach the leaves and stems, lay the leaves on the apple top and poke the pipe cleaner through the foam sheet and into the cotton ball.  The kids were able to help with this part, but assisting with stem attachment did not allow this mama to take any pictures 😉
 
Our crop of apples were ready for playing with!
 
We followed along with the book as we read to stack up apples one by one.  What a great way to learn and play with math facts, counting, number order, and simple adding.  Little Guy LOVED this activity.
We got to hammering the cotton balls and this was the really fun part!  The baked cotton balls have a hard outer edge that allow for a satisfying crunch when smashed, and a squishy, cottony center.  What a fun way to explore and play.
 
We used a plastic hammer, but any hammer would do.
In fact, fists work just as well for smashing.
We had a smashing afternoon.

 

The remains of our cotton ball smashing reminded us of this page in the book.  Be sure to let us know if you make baked cotton balls!  We would love to hear about your experience with this sensory and fine motor activity!
 
Stop by the other Preschool Book Club bloggers to see their takes on Ten Apples Up On Top!
 
Sensory Bag from Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails | Relay Race from Homegrown Friends | Play Dough Activity from Buggy and Buddy

Hand-Eye Coordination Letter Activity for Kids

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How many times a day do you hear the phrase, “I’m hungry!” ?? It seems like that’s all I hear all. day. long.  One afternoon the kids were extremely hungry. again. and I put together this quick little activity and snack combined. 

We practiced a few skills (letter identification, letter matching, visual scanning, eye-hand coordination, fine motor skills) while we enjoyed a little letter snack!


Kids will love to practice letter matching with alphabet cookies!
 
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Letter Matching Activity for Kids

I used a sheet of paper and quickly wrote out the lower case letters of the alphabet.  Our snack was a little cup of alphabet cookies.  We matched up the upper case letters to the lower case letters.  This was a great activity for my preschooler.  Little Guy (age 5) was so quick to match the letters (mostly because he wanted to eat them)!  Baby Girl (age 2 and 1/2) had some trouble with identifying the upper case letters, but we haven’t really worked on that yet. This is a great activity to introduce letter identification for younger preschoolers.  The cookie incentive is sweet!

Mom only snuck a few cookies.
This is a fun eye hand coordination activity for kids. Bonus, it's a snack too!

Visual Scanning Activity for Kids

Visual scanning is essential for handwriting skills, puzzles, word searches, mazes, and many many functional tasks.  Scanning a room for a missing sock may be difficult if a child demonstrates difficulty with visual scanning. 
When matching the upper case letters to the lower case letters, the child must scan the whole page in order to search and find the correct letter.  Younger children or those working on visual scanning skills may require modifications to this.  You could fold the page in half, offering only half of the options.

Fine Motor Activity for Kids

Picking up those cookies and laying them flat on the paper is a fun way to practice fine motor skills.  Don’t let those cookies crumble by pinching too hard!  Children will use a tip to tip grasp to pick up the cookies from the table surface, may tuck one or a few cookies into their palms, and transfer the cookies one at a time (hopefully!) into their mouths.  What a great fine motor experience!

Hand-Eye Coordination Activity for Kids

Hand-eye coordination is using the information received through the vision system to coordinate the hands with control, in order to complete a task, such as handwriting or catching a ball.

Don’t have alphabet cookies?  You could also use alphabet pretzels or
alphabet cereal in this activity.

Visual Motor Scanning Activity to Color Match

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Visual Motor Integration is also known as eye hand coordination.  Essentially, this skill is the ability to coordinate the hand in an effective manner directed by vision.  When relying on visual motor skills, a person coordinates their movements based on what they see.  A child requires effective visual motor skills in order to do so many tasks…forming letters, writing on a line, coloring within lines, cutting along a line, catching a ball, completing puzzles, reading, and so much more. 
This fun (and colorful) activity is easy to create at home and a fun way to work on visual motor integration.  We added a color matching component to our activity, but you can adjust this activity to include what ever best keeps your child’s attention.
Visual scanning and visual motor color matching activity for kids

Visual Motor Color Matching Activity

This post contains affiliate links. 
I started by drawing small circles all over a sheet of construction paper.  I used a bunch of different colors that matched the colors of stickers we had.  These rainbow stickers are the perfect size for little fingers to peel and work on fine motor skills.
Use stickers to color match and work on eye-hand coordiantion, fine motor skills.
I had Baby Girl (aged 2 and a half) peel off the stickers and place them on the circles.  Scanning for the matching color works on those eye-hand coordination abilities and also works on color identification. 
This was also a great way for Little Guy (age 4) to work on his visual motor skills.  He’s working on letter formation and ability to write in a smaller space with better control.  The fine motor and visual motor work in the activity are perfect for the new hand writer.
Eye hand coordination is tested and practiced with this easy color matching activity for kids.

This is such an easy way to work on so many skills.  We’ll be doing this activity again, for sure, with a few modifications.  Instead of matching colors to colored circles, try matching letters, numbers, emotions, and more!

What are other ways you can work on visual motor skills at home?

 

    • Tic Tack Toe

 

    • Copying shapes/drawings

 

    • tracing paper

 

    • mazes

 

    • dot to dot pictures

 

    • pegboard designs

 

    • copying lite brite designs

 

    • rolling and catching a ball

 

    • flashlight tag

Pipe Cleaner Busy Bag

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This pipe cleaner busy bag is a creative way to use pipe cleaners while helping preschoolers to develop fine motor skills and visual motor skills. Add this pipe cleaner busy activity to your list of preschooler activities!

Pipe Cleaner Busy Bag

I have been trying to think of activities to keep my 3-year-old son busy lately. He is a busy little guy a
 
nd always wants to be involved in what we are doing in our homeschool. I typically have little busy-bag activities for him to do and needed to add in some new ones.
 
We have lots of pipe cleaners so I decided to make a pipe cleaner shape matching activity. I created some simple pictures for him to use to create shapes with pipe cleaners or yarn. You could really do this with any shapes, but I thought it would be fun to make it a more creative picture with nature scenes.


pipe cleaner shape matching
 
 
 
pipe cleaner busy bag
 
I made several different printable pages that can be used in a busy bag or just for anytime. 
 
shape matching busy bag
 
We tried doing the activities with yarn as well and it is a little easier to shape them for younger kids.
 

 

 

Working on fine motor skills, visual perception, visual motor skills, sensory tolerance, handwriting, or scissor skills? Our Fine Motor Kits cover all of these areas and more.

Check out the seasonal Fine Motor Kits that kids love:

Letters Fine Motor Kit
Kit de motricidad fina de verano
Summer Fine Motor Kit
Outer Space Fine Motor Kit
Space Fine Motor Kit
Spring fine motor kit
Valentines Day fine motor kit
winter fine motor kit
Winter Fine Motor Kit

Or, grab one of our themed Fine Motor Kits to target skills with fun themes:

Want access to all of these kits…and more being added each month? Join The OT Toolbox Member’s Club!

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:

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 :

Color Shape Sorting, Patterns, Counting

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This sorting and pattern activity is a great fine motor and visual motor task for young learners. I love that the fine motor aspect builds pre-writing skills as well as math skills. You’ll also want to grab our color and count worksheet for more fine motor work with math and patterning as well as sorting objects.

Moldable Color, Shape, Sorting, Counting, and Patterns!

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate ads. We receive a compensation when a sale is made by clicking through from our blog.  All opinions are our own.

Color Shape Sorting, Counting, Patterns with Wikki Stix

We love playing with Wikki Stix.  We’ve used them in so many fun ways.  One day, Little Guy and I made some shapes and did a little sorting.

Color Shape Sorting, Counting, Patterns with Wikki Stix
 
Little Guy was sure to tell me if the shape didn’t quite look right.  “Mom, that square doesn’t look square-y”.  We counted how many of each shape we had.
 
Color Shape Sorting, Counting, Patterns with Wikki Stix
 
Little Guy made up a subtraction game as he put them into the box.  He counted each time he took a shape away and said “…minus one iiiiiiiiissss….”  He had so much fun doing this little game!
Color Shape Sorting, Counting, Patterns with Wikki Stix

After we finished with the shapes, he said we should do a pattern.  We pulled all of the wikki stix into strait lines and he came up with the pattern.  This was a fun quiet time activity for both of us!

 
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