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.

Pool noodle uses inspired by Pinterest

Shosh kabob pool noodle and pool noodle alien. Can string as giant beads or pattern if you have different colors. And make cool things by stabbing the alien with sticks etc. But you would not say stab to the kids! Lolol

Mat man from handwriting without tears

The matman hanging in our school’s OT land! Ugh I am writing on my phone and it autocorrected three times to batman!