These are rythym sticks my sister and I have had for like 20 years! 

Potentially a nice way to roam outdoors with a child, gathering items that have fallen, and then making pictures like this beautiful one, I forget where I found this picture years ago. 

Go to a beach or area with lots of rocks and look for ones with holes. Gather those ones, then also make sure you have some circular candy (I think here we used peanut M&Ms) and make a sculpture to photograph! Mom and I had made this one years ago. I recommend highly you find a picture book or images online of Andy Goldsworthy’s photos, for ideas and inspiration. I’ve loved him since I was a child. 🙂

Thanks all for writing in!  I will have a review of the magic weighted blanket soon – he also sent me one in exchange for an honest review. So far, so good – I have it at one of my schools and by next weekend will be ready to write a review after it being there a few weeks. 🙂 

I also need to write a guest entry for a site, post a contributing article from a site, and do some other reviews. I need to find where I put Tonya's super awesome writing charms she developed – off TherapyFunZone.com – I want to try those ASAP and I put them somewhere safe – too safe.

Have a good week all 🙂 I am at 25 new mails and under 200 old on my gmail (all related to blog), so it could be a lot worse, but still behind. My new thing is that  if you ask me a lot of questions, I think I'd rather try to answer them on the phone rather than write long e-mails. Also, would anybody be interested if I hosted the occasional chat on Google Plus? Let me know if so. ::crickets::

This was a small fine motor rotation I did recently, six kids, six mini centers where they did one thing for 3 minutes, then moved onto next.  In this case I had a $2 corkboard dog I had gotten from Target, plus push pins. They had to give the dog his shots and then take them out. They were all fans. And they’ve all swallowed the immunization kool-aid as they commented that all those shots would make him “super healthy” 🙂 They can put the shots where ever they want, one of my little dudes made sure he helped out the “butt infection” 🙂 

1. Get those “dot” stickers you can write on.

2. Have child use best handwriting to number the dots, 1 through 15 or so

3. Have child place dots on themselves, mostly on arms, legs, a few on torso perhaps as appropriate. In random order, where-ever. 

4. Have child sit or stand on unstable surface while guarding them for safety, and have them take stickers off, in order, so scanning themselves to find them. 

5. Have the child replace them on the original surface or something where they are able to re-peel them.

6. Show the child how to hole punch 15 pieces of scratch paper.

7. Show them to label each page with the dot sticker, in order, turning over each page, so its organized.

7. Have them put the organized, sorted pages in a 3 ring binder. 

8. Profit???? 

9. Just kidding. But lots of our kids need work on hole punching, organizing, opening/closing binders, etc. I think this would be a great activity for a 3rd or 4th grader for sure. 

Next step/next time could be taking out the papers, placing them in folders, or scattering the papers in the air so they need to be re-sorted, working on folding, stapling, etc. 

Also, I have spent the evening organizing my visual perceptual/motor box, by the time I am done I will have two gigantic binders (to be fair like an entire one of those binders is duplicates), with visual motor, spatial, visual closure, discrimination, laterality, blah blah blah etc. Also a ton of special random books. I have generically organized it, hole punched, divided, placed in binder, etc for now. It needs more refinement, but I'm trying to tell myself to focus on big picture for now, just getting it all accessible and generally organized, and then I can go back and weed out or re-categorize things as my next step. I tend to obsess over little things and then nothing gets done. I also have a lot of book resources where I either need to make copies (pretty sure Hell consists of making copies, I HATE IT), or make my own versions. One thing I thought of is either making or buying number stickers or alphabet stickers, small, then placing them all over (appropriate) parts of a child's body like arms, torso, legs, etc. Then having the child sit on a T stool or ball or some other unstable surface and have to find stickers in order – whethers it 1 through 10, A-Z, shapes/colors/items you call out, whatever. The child then has to work on staying stable, scanning their body for the stickers, sequencing, crossing midline (ie using L hand to take sticker off R arm), you can put them on forearms etc to encourage supination (holding hands facing upwards like holding a soup bowl), or even on bottom of feet or near bottom of feet to further destabilize…..

As always use discretion, careful supervision with contact guard assist or more as necessary, stay away from areas they could hit their head, etc etc etc, blah blah blah, legal disclaimers, etc, use your best judgment….

Suspend, balance game Interesting, tried it at friend Orli’s house. (Orli is a super awesome famous low vision therapist!!) 

Fine motor toys in Norway that came originally from USA Denny’s

Beads used in weighted blanket 

Painting and drinks go together…right Orli. 

I think people in Norway have more advanced sensory systems because their stairs are super steep. 

I want this. I took this picture in Norway or Denmark and I want to make a version. 

This pic just made me laugh. 

A reminder to myself to maybe try this craft. 

cool ergo spatula in Norway

Super awesome weighted blanket an amazing friend donated that she made for me. So I donated it to one of my SPED classrooms. It’s 12 pounds. Using the beads showed above so washable. 

I want to do this. You get holey balls and stick a light scarf in them, have to pull it out. 

My professional friends with graduate degrees enjoy hanging out with me trying out new toys for my kids, sorry the pic is so dark. 

Norwegians and me. 🙂 Super cute. 

An app I wanted to look into, I took pic with phone while reading magazine in a waiting room. Um, I still haven’t checked it out. 

Some of my recent new stuff we got from district…well not the dominoes.