Fine motor olympics

Olympics Activities for therapy - The OT Toolbox

Ready to get your little athletes moving in therapy with some Olympics activities for therapy goals? Here, you’ll find fun Olympic crafts, games, and ideas to support development through play. Start my making an Olympic Rings craft to develop fine motor skills, and then move onto gross motor ideas, medal activities, and more!

Olympic Activities for Therapy

I’ve tried to sort the Olympics activities below into skill area, so if you are looking for ideas to promote fine motor skills, check out the craft ideas. If you need gross motor activities, check out the Olympic games ideas. All of these ideas can be great for ceremony in your own therapy clinic! These are great to add to lesson plans this time of year.

Fine Motor Olympic Crafts for Kids

Are you looking for a few fun ideas for the kids to celebrate the Olympic Games?

Try making gold, silver, and bronze play dough with crayons for a bold color and smooth, glittery texture to the metallic play dough that will last for the length of the Olympic games. Be sure to store the play dough in a plastic bag and you will be able to create play dough medals for weeks.
You could make an Olympic torch, olive leaf crown, and read a few Olympic books like Teach Beside Me did: Greek Olympics Lesson.
Cut foil to make medals. Use a craft stick to write names or numbers right onto the foil to work on pencil pressure.
Use foil to wrap around a plastic lid or cardboard circle.
Draw a soccer field on a large piece of paper. Use clothes pins to move a cotton ball or craft pom pom to different points on the field. Or, use a straw to blow the craft pom pom across the field to work on oral motor skills.
Or, you could make an Olympic Flag Craft using construction paper and a paper tube.

Olympic Art for Kids

If Olympic Art is more your style, use paints, stamps, or craft materials to make rings.

Use a tissue box to make ice skates.
Use a toilet paper tube or paper towel tube to make an Olympic torch (just add tissue paper for the flame). This is a great tool to use in an obstacle course too!
Make a discus using a paper plate. Staple two plates together around the edges.
Create Olympic rings by tracing a cup, cookie cutter, paper bowl and creating the rings.
Stamp rings using a paper towel tube.

We love this Olympic Rings Art. made from a re-purposed canvas from Happy Hooligans.

Gross Motor Olympic Games for therapy

The Olympics are a great theme to use in therapy sessions. Try these movement activities for gross motor skills, coordination, balance, endurance, and sensory input:

Crawling along an obstacle course
Balance beam activities
Indoor ice skating
Animal walks
Relay races
Create a paper plate discus and throw it at a target (a hula hoop works well)
Wheelbarrow walks
Throw a pool noodle like a javelin throw
Use balls or bean bags in a shot put activity
Use a scooter board and pretend it’s a bobsled or skies
Bounce a ball around a cone
Sled or ski down a therapy wedge
Use buckets or cones to create relay races
Create hurdles using pool noodles for jumping over and crawling under

If getting active is on your agenda, KCEdventures shows us how to plan your own Olympic celebration for kids.

Olympic Handwriting Activity

Ask your therapy attendees to write a list of Olympic sports. Work on handwriting skills such as letter formation, margin use, line awareness, and legibility.

You can also follow the highlights reel online and keep track of the number of medals accumulated by each country, or write down the top countries according to medal count.
To work on number formation, use graph paper as a medal tracker. This is a motivating activity for learners!
Another fun therapy activity to use during the Olympics is to create a large venn diagram on paper, a wall chalkboard, or dry erase board. The learners can write out the similarities and differences between the Winter Games and the Summer Games. This handwriting task focuses on organizational skills, spatial awareness, and margin use.

Write a list of winter sports being played during the Winter Olympic Games:

Bobsled
Skiing
Figure skating
Speed skating
Snowboarding
Ice hockey
Curling
Luge
Skeleton

Olympic Visual Motor Activities

Support visual motor skills by asking kids to copy the Olympic rings. Include colors to engage visual perceptual skills.

Olympic Food for Kids

Getting the kids involved in a cooking activity is a great executive functioning activity. Try these Olympic themed foods:
Make these rainbow snacks using colors of the Olympic rings.
These Olympic foods for Kids has some great ideas.

Colleen Beck, OTR/L is an occupational therapist with 20+ years experience, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 2000. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. As the creator, author, and owner of the website and its social media channels, Colleen strives to empower those serving kids of all levels and needs. Want to collaborate? Send an email to [email protected].

Winter Games Fine Motor Activities

465 shares

With the Winter Olympics quickly approaching it’s the perfect time to add this theme into your fine motor and gross motor activities. All the different sports make adding winter games fine motor activities easy. At a young age (3-5) I’m not a big fan of tons of worksheets, but instead working on fine motor through manipulatives and play as much as possible. Check out some of the fun winter games fine motor activities!

Winter Games Fine Motor Activities

Affiliate links are used below to promote products I recommend. These links will have the word affiliate before them. I receive a commission if any purchases are made through these links. Please see my disclosure policy for more details.

The winter games are awesome for fine motor and gross motor skills. Check out all the Winter Sports Gross Motor Ideas, Winter Sports Stations, and Olympic Ring Gross Motor Ideas.

The preschooler at my house has taken a interest in table top activities. It wasn’t really until recently that this was of any interest to him. Instead of begging for the iPad during his “quiet time” I’ve put together several different fun fine motor activities that he can work on. He let me know that they were “ridiculously” fun. We have all of these activities available for you in the Winter Sports Fine Motor Activities Pack.

Start off with a fun figure skate pom activity. Move the pom to the skate and match the colors. Use a tongs, spoon, fingers or tweezers to work on this skill.

A fun beading activity that goes along with the winter sports and winter games theme is ring beading. Adhere a pipe cleaner to the ring with a number in the middle. Add the amount of beads to the pipe cleaner as indicated on the ring.

The ski stick patterns have been a lot of fun. Arrange craft sticks to match the pattern cards. This can be accomplished by placing the craft sticks directly over the cards (they are large enough) or placing them next to the cards. If you have (affiliate) colored craft sticks try to match the colors as well!

I’ve also created fun ways to work on pre-writing strokes. Pre-writing skills are lines and strokes that need to be mastered BEFORE learning how to print the alphabet. Each is developed in a sequence. We’ve been using pre-writing strips to do this in a variety of ways.

Laminate and cut out pre-writing strips.
Use a dry erase marker for writing so it can easily be wiped off lamination and re-used again.
Pre-writing strips can be practiced in multiple ways.
Use of fingers to follow lines.
Follow the lines with a paint brush
Use materials such as Wikki Stix to go over lines and shapes.
Follow the lines with pipe cleaners.
Follow the lines with manipulatives.

We’ve also worked on this by writing in the “snow”. Salt and a tray (affiliate –such as these) work great for this activity. A finger, a gloved finger (sticking with the winter theme) or a paint brush all work nicely!

He’s also been working on fine motor strengthening using clothes pins. This simple “gold medal” game let’s him work on his fine motor strength by using clothes pins and one to one correspondence by matching numbers with the dots on the card.

Not to forget an opportunity for cutting, he’s been working on different cutting tasks including straight lines, curves, and shapes.

Get All Your Winter Sports Fine Motor Activities

At Pink Oatmeal we understand that you are busy. We want to make these activities easy for you so we’ve done the work of creating them and putting them in a pack for you. Grab all your Winter Games/Sports fine motor activities today! ALL of the above activities are included for you in this pack! There are 45 pages of printables so you can enjoy these now and continue to use them over and over again!

Winter Resources From Pink Oatmeal

Pink Oatmeal has a huge selection of winter resources for you to choose from. Get everything you need to work on motor skills all winter long!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE WINTER RESOURCES FROM PINK OATMEAL

Click on the name of the images in the photos below to get a full detailed view of the winter resource available at Pink Oatmeal!

Winter Movement Games
Winter Yoga Story
Winter Fine Motor Activities
Winter Yoga
Winter Yoga Bundle
Winter Motor Bundle
Winter Movement Bundle
Winter Yoga Cards and Printables
Winter Sports Fine Motor Activities
Winter Sports Stations
Winter Friends Pre-Writing
Winter Counting Movement Game
Winter Movement Game
Winter Sports Movement Game
Winter Wheelchair Game
Gnome Upper Extremity Game
Winter Brain Break Cards
Penguin Life Cycle
Winter Sensory and Motor Path Printables
Reindeer Life Cycle

Panel for the development of fine motor skills of hands.

Description
School Stage
Interdistrict stage
City Stage

Status

Winner (Feb. 12, 2019, 1:03 p.m.)

Result

Winner

Conference

Interdistrict Conference uzao-5

Section

Type 9 of work

0013

Project

Application date

Jan. 15, 2019, 9:36 p.m.

School

GBOU School No. 1492

Authors

Valeria V.K. (Grade 11)

Supervisor

Elena A.Yu.

Final score

12.8

I have a little nephew who is 4 years old. He goes to classes with a speech therapist. For the development of fine motor skills of the hands, the speech therapist advised my sister to purchase various developing rugs or panels. There are many such things in stores, but they are all aimed at solving one or more problems. For example, one rug teaches you how to tie and untie shoelaces, another how to fasten and unbutton buttons, and so on. And we did not meet the combined rugs. Then I decided to sew such a panel rug for my nephew myself.
Project Goal:
To create a panel for the development of fine motor skills for my nephew.
Hypothesis:
Properly selected educational blocks of panels contribute to the development of fine motor skills of the hands.
The period of a child's life of 4-5 years can be described as the transition from early childhood to preschool. The kid is actively developing, learns the world around him and discovers it for himself through communication with adults and peers.
During this period, the intellect of the child develops.
The development of fine motor skills of the hands affects the intelligence of the baby, his memory, attention and thinking. Therefore, every mother strives to start exercising with the baby as early as possible. Many parents think that only specialists in development centers can conduct such classes. Of course, you can take the baby to classes in groups, but it’s easy to study at home, having developed a system and lesson plan that will be of interest to the child at an early and preschool age and are aimed at developing physical activity.
A child's mind is at their fingertips. (V. A. Sukhomlinsky).

Files:

Presentation: Panel for the development of fine motor skills of hands. As of Jan. 15, 2019, 9:36 p.m. (1.4MB)
Text of the work: Panel for the development of fine motor skills of hands. As of Jan. 15, 2019, 9:36 p.m. (3.4MB)

Does not comply with the regulations - participants of grades 7-11 are allowed to the city stage.
The direction is not correct. The direction can be changed while editing the job.
The work does not meet the requirements for design work. http://mgk.olimpiada.ru/publishing_rules/
The work does not meet the requirements for research work. http://mgk.olimpiada.ru/publishing_rules/
Incomplete completeness of the work for examination (no text of the work / no presentation of the work).
The work contains incorrectly cited material (it must be quoted, sources must be indicated).
Thank you for participating. Your work has been judged by experts. The final score did not reach the value of the pass for the face-to-face round in this section. In your personal account you can see the scores by criteria.

Games and exercises for the development of fine motor skills.

At the initial stage of life, it is fine motor skills that reflect how a child develops, testifies to his intellectual abilities. Children with poorly developed manual motor skills awkwardly hold a spoon, a pencil, cannot fasten buttons, lace up shoes. It can be difficult for them to collect scattered parts of the designer, work with puzzles, counting sticks, and mosaics. They refuse modeling and applique, which are loved by other children, they do not keep up with the guys in the classroom.

Thus, the opportunities for children to master the world turn out to be impoverished. Children often feel inadequate in elementary activities available to their peers. This affects the emotional well-being of the child, his self-esteem. Over time, the level of development creates school difficulties.

Fine motor skills - the ability to manipulate small objects, transfer objects from hand to hand, and perform tasks that require coordinated eye and hand work. Fine motor skills are associated with the nervous system, vision, attention, memory and perception of the child. Also, scientists have proven that the development of fine motor skills and the development of speech are very closely related. And this is explained very simply. There are centers in the human brain that are responsible for speech and finger movements. They are located very close. Therefore, by developing fine motor skills, we activate the zones responsible for the formation of children's speech and increase the child's performance, his attention, mental activity, intellectual and creative activity. In addition, fine motor skills directly affect manual dexterity, which will be formed in the future, the child’s reaction speed, the level of logical thinking, memory, reasoning, concentration and imagination.

And, therefore, at preschool age, work on the development of fine motor skills and coordination of hand movements should become an important part of the development of children's speech, the formation of self-service skills and preparation for writing. From how deftly the child learns to control his fingers, his further development depends. Along with the development of fine motor skills, memory, attention, and vocabulary develop.

There is a wide variety of games and exercises to develop fine motor skills in children's hands. I will give a few examples.

Button games

Choose from different sizes and colors of buttons. Try laying out a drawing, then ask your child to do the same. After the child learns to complete the task, invite him to come up with his own versions of the drawings. A flower, a tumbler, a snowman, a butterfly, balls, beads, etc. can be laid out from a button mosaic.

Buttons can be strung on a thread to make beads, sewn to fabric.

Seeds game

Different cereals are used for the game: buckwheat, rice, millet. The child is invited to squeeze the grains in a fist, pour them from one hand to another, mix in a deep bowl. The duration of each exercise is 3 minutes.

Kinesiology Toy

Kinesiology exercise is a set of movements that allow activating interhemispheric influence.

Kinesiology exercises include a set of exercises, such as mirror drawing with two hands; exercises like “Touch your ear with one hand, your nose with the other, then quickly change”, “Fist-palm, fist-palm”.

Bead games

Various stringing perfectly develops the hand. You can string everything that is stringed: buttons, beads, pasta, drying, etc. You can make beads from cardboard circles, squares, hearts, tree leaves.

Lacing games

Can be used both factory-made and handmade. Such games develop spatial orientation, attention, creativity

Application

The following exercises must be constantly performed: symmetrical cutting, cutting out figures from postcards with scissors. From carved figures, children can make compositions - applications. If the child is still small, let him tear pictures from a magazine or newspaper with his hands - as it will, and you will stick the torn pieces on a blank sheet, giving them some form.

Hand massage with massage ball

- roll the ball between the palms with longitudinal movements;
- roll the ball between the palms in a circular motion;
- roll the ball on the table, first with the right, then with the left hand;
- cover the ball with your right hand, squeeze and unclench it.

Repeat 4 times. Perform the same action with your left hand.

Kinetic sand play

- find figurines, small toys, molds among the sand;

- to mold figures from kinetic sand, "Knead the dough", "Let's make pies".