Our Favorite OT Resources
One of the best parts about occupational therapy and teletherapy is that activities that address a variety of skills do not need to be difficult, hard to find, or have many components.
By taking everyday activities and tweaking or targeting different skills, you can address a variety of skills while also increasing the odds that a student will generalize those skills in the classroom.
I've been loving this activity for handwriting activities for my elementary school students. It's so motivating for them and always gives us a good laugh. Plus, this is a FREE download on Teachers Pay Teachers.
This activity is great for visual motor skills and can easily be completed on the computer.
I love this activity for children in preschool working on pre-writing skills to draw or for a little older children to cut.
These warm-up exercises are amazing for children needing proprioceptive and/or vestibular input.
I utilize this website when working on visual memory, visual perception, spatial relationships, form constancy, and visual scanning.
This website is great because it gives me a variety of approaches such as puzzles, word searches, and a memory game to engage students and keep it different each time.
It is also nice when I can share my screen with them to see how they are completing each task...so cool when we can utilize the same interface!
This packet celebrates all things OT and has some great, FREE resources to help teach students about our profession.
ACTIVITIES + RESOURCES TO ADDRESS + IMPROVE FIGURE GROUND SKILLS
Some of my favorite skills to work on are visual perceptual skills - and more specifically, figure ground skills. Figure ground refers to the ability to focus on one object in a busy visual field. Think of it as trying to find a jar of mayonnaise in a fridge full of food!
Figure ground skills are important for reading, copying words/notes from a board, organization of personal materials, and completing written schoolwork, such as tests.
Hidden picture activities address a variety of skills, but are my favorite resource to address deficits with figure ground skills.
Students must choose an item from a bank of pictures to locate within the larger picture. These can start out simple with simple backgrounds and become progressively more challenging as a student demonstrates improvement. My favorite website is www.highlightskids.com
Word searches promote visual scanning as well as isolation of letters and words within a bank of letters.
These can be graded up or down, and provide ample opportunities to increase/decrease cues and prompts as needed for each student. A great website with a variety of word searches that I frequently use is www.thewordsearch.com. This site is great for teletherapy because it can be screen shared with the students to allow them to complete the activity.
Puzzles come in a variety of categories and levels of difficulty, and all are great to address figure ground skills.
Students must visually scan each piece and generalize pictures that fit. In teletherapy, I've used both puzzles found online, as well as utilizing puzzles that a school has available so that the student can complete it on camera. One of my favorite puzzles for K-3 is the ABC Slider Puzzle on www.abcya.com. It works on figure ground and sequencing at the same time!
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