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.

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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.

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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.

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This activity is great for visual motor skills and can easily be completed on the computer.

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I love this activity for children in preschool working on pre-writing skills to draw or for a little older children to cut.

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These warm-up exercises are amazing for children needing proprioceptive and/or vestibular input.

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I utilize this website when working on visual memory, visual perception, spatial relationships, form constancy, and visual scanning.

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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.

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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!

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This packet celebrates all things OT and has some great, FREE resources to help teach students about our profession.

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ACTIVITIES + RESOURCES TO ADDRESS + IMPROVE FIGURE GROUND SKILLS

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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!

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Figure ground skills are important for reading, copying words/notes from a board, organization of personal materials, and completing written schoolwork, such as tests.

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Hidden picture activities address a variety of skills, but are my favorite resource to address deficits with figure ground skills.

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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

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Word searches promote visual scanning as well as isolation of letters and words within a bank of letters.

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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.

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Puzzles come in a variety of categories and levels of difficulty, and all are great to address figure ground skills.

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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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