THERAPY THURSDAY: SUPER EASY FINE MOTOR SKILLS ACTIVITY

Happy Therapy Thursday everyone!  Today, we’re going to share a SUPER easy way to target fine motor skills and visual motor skills with kids.  By the end of the week, we’re ready for some simple, laid back fun in the therapy room and in the classrooms where we work.  So, we’ve come up with a new feature  called Therapy Thursday!

We’ll be giving you a little glimpse of the simple, fun activities we’re doing in therapy each week.  If you’re a therapist, hopefully you’ll find a few little tricks to add to your therapy bag.  If you’re a teacher, parent, grandparent, or anyone who works or lives with kids – hopefully you’ll find some awesome new ideas to try at home or in the classroom!

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This week I happened to have a bunch of little stickers and a bag of small, flat-sided marbles in my therapy box.  The kids dove right into the stickers, so I just let them go to town, peeling the stickers off and placing them anywhere they wanted all over their paper.  Playing with stickers is great for working on grasping, bilateral coordination, and fine motor coordination.

Then, I wrote numbers next to each sticker.  In some places, I numbered the stickers in a line from left to right.  In other places, I jumped around a bit.

Next, I had the kids place one of the flat-sided marbles on each number, but to add to the challenge…they had to do it in numerical order!  This was a great visual scanning and figure ground activity (finding a target against a competing background).

Finally, the kids cleared the marbles off the paper and connected the stickers (again, in numerical order) with a marker.  Here, we were working on visual motor integration, and again, visual scanning as the kids found each numbered sticker.

So what do you think?  Pretty easy, right?  The kids loved it and wanted to try it again and again, asking me to number the stickers “funny” so that the would have to zigzag all over with their marker :)

Let us know if you give this one a try – leave a comment below, or give us a shout over on Facebook!

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Claire Heffron

Claire Heffron is co-author at The Inspired Treehouse and a pediatric occupational therapist in a preschool/primary school setting. She began her career with a bachelor's degree in magazine journalism but quickly changed course to pursue graduate studies in occupational therapy. She has been practicing therapy for 10 years in public and specialized preschool/primary school settings. She is a mom to three funny, noisy boys and relies on yoga, good food, and time outside to bring her back to center.

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