OT Life Hack: Use car cup holders for not just drinks

Key caps: An OT's best friend, no matter what age!

My OT kids love them. And it helps me know what key is which. Monster is for work and monkey is my home. Also it can be great for visual impairments if you get very different shapes. Every teacher I have given one to loves them! It makes ordinary things fun. Kids see keys with a new eye. 🙂  Key caps. My favorites are my monsters, but they wear out over time and when traumatically amputated I feel kinda sad. Seriously.

Slackline

Work on Stereognosis with food.

The other day I was eating a cup filled with blueberries, cherries, and tiny grapes, while driving. I would reach into cup holder with right hand and keeping eyes on road, so it was all via stereognosis, ie eyeballs on my fingers, that I would know which gruit it was. I realized it was a great way to work with kids on stereognosis in an efficient and motivating and fun way. For example you could fill a cup with items like small twizzler bites and cocoa puffs and have the kid figure out which one he was grabbing if he couldn’t see. You could incorporate a lot of descriptive words and ask questions about whether it feels long and skinny and soft or hard and circular and small, etc. If they are more advanced you could use more objects or more similar ones such as two types of cereal. Think about how often kids need to grab a pencil out of their desk or how often we grab stuff without looking. Most kids learn this naturally but many of our occupational therapy kids need to be taught how to do this skill and how to break it down into manageable chunks. By using food they want or need to eat anyway, you can do things like indirectly incorporating counting or graphing or fine motor skills while also teaching stereognosis skills in a fun OT way. Win win. And a thousand variations are possible. This could be great for a joint OT and speech therapy session! I wrote this on my phone sorry if it is weird. 🙂 ps this pic isn’t quite accurate since I don’t think wet fruits would work on a plate like that but you see the shape variations!!

Sponge bob awesomeness

My PT friend is showing OT tendencies. She made this for a patient at hospital.

pretty cool life hack :)

http://lifehacker.com/pack-single-servings-of-condiments-in-contact-lens-case-934174095

Zentangle professing my OT love :)

Some fun Games used in PT.

I loooveeee Rush Hour Jr for some of our higher functioning kids. Can work on visuospatial skills and problem solving and sequencing and frustration tolerance and more!! I also like the matrix game with clothespins and the card game Blink. Blink is great for attention and focus and matching and impulse control etc 🙂 by the way they have plain Rush Hour for older kids and all these games could be user with adults as well. Maybe in traumatic brain injury? TBI.

Unintentional humor…

For those of us who work with very literal children. Often seen in autism. I had a kid who thought he was on fire when a teacher used that expression for doing a good job. His eyes widened and he was like “really??!!” And looked down. Cutest first grader ever. 🙂

Celia: years of volunteer Greenspan

I love this picture. She is the reason I became an OT. I learned about OTs existence because she was getting it. I was in my early 20s.