OTPlan helps you find activity ideas and can be easily sorted by skills or common household materials. They offer activity ideas that support sensory and motor development through games and other engaging activities. In addition, you can purchase Skills in a Box, which is designed to promote your “child’s developmental skills and supports academic standards at the convenience of your home.”
At TheAutismHelper.com, occupational therapist Katie McKenna, MS, OTR/L, provides a list of ideas for ways families can support their child at home. Her suggestions are specific to goals or needs (such as fine and gross motor skills, handwriting and visual motor activities, sensory skills, and daily living and executive functioning skills) and can be realistically done at home within natural routines. Resources include printable activities such as an indoor scavenger hunt and a visual “calm calendar” that includes physical activities.
This article from Edtopia includes recommendations from trauma-informed and special education teachers, OTs, and other service providers for advice on making at-home sensory spaces and activities, creating sensory tools from items found around the house, and best practices for meeting kids’ sensory needs, such as the colorful guided breathing video above.
Check out this article on OTPerspective.com for activity ideas include help with pincer grasp, finger isolation, thumb opposition, tripod grasp, hand-eye coordination, bilateral coordination, and midline integration.
This app lets kids get creative while improving fine motor skills. Kids use the app to make, bake, decorate, store, serve, and eat virtual cookies. The app includes 24 recipes that let you “pour the vanilla, crack the eggs, shake the salt, and interact with the other ingredients.”
This is exactly what it sounds like: an app for cutting buttons. It is interactive and requires users to maneuver virtual scissors — using their thumb and index finger — to cut buttons off pieces of fabric to earn points.
This super fun and addictive game also works well in pediatric OT. Patients use their fingers to slice fruit with swords while avoiding bombs. In “event mode,” players can battle against other fruit ninjas.
Practice letters with a cute game that helps teach the shapes of letters and fine motor skills. The app can be used with a finger or a stylus. Perfect for working on handwriting during summer break!
Looking for more apps that turn fine motor, visual perception, and sensory integration skill development into play? Check out this roundup of an OT's favorite apps!
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