Get Moving and Talking...Anywhere, Anytime
/Trilogy Therapy has simple tips to continue fostering minds and bodies of our precious kids, anywhere, anytime!
Lo-Tech Options for PT at Home
Charades - Encourages motor planning and control
Potential Categories
Animals (Flamingo, Frog, Duck, Cat, Chicken, Dog, Snake, etc)
Sport Activities (Baseball, Volleyball, Golf, Hockey, Basketball, etc)
Musical Instruments (Guitar, Piano, Drums, Trumpet, Flute, etc)
Balloon Living Room Volleyball - Great for visual tracking and eye-hand coordination
Set up the “court”
Each person gets 3 hits to get ball back to other side
Don’t let the balloon hit the floor
Higher Tech Options for PT at Home
GoNoodle - Online website to encourage movement and activity all related to educational topics
Create a free family account or an educator account
https://assets-gnp-ssl.gonoodle.com/parent_invite_pdfs/gonoodle_parent_invite_en.pdf
Different categories including: Mindfulness, Sensory and Motor Skills, and Movement Type
YouTube Work-Outs
Many different fun workouts for kids
Yoga, Frozen, SuperMario Brothers, etc
Low Tech Options for Speech Therapy at Home
Play “I spy…”
A good game of “I spy…” can be played anywhere! Try playing it by giving two to three describing clues (i.e., “I spy something green, soft, and you sit on it).
Baking/Cooking/Crafting
What a great time to bond and work together on something creative! This time also allows for lots of direction following, sequencing, and new vocabulary. Let your child help you with dinner, bake dessert, or make that scrap book you’ve been meaning to do for years!
Go for a walk or bike ride
Get outside together and move. What a wonderful time to talk about what’s going on around you. Work on opposites (i.e., fast and slow, up and down, etc.), find and/or show verbs (i.e, find things that fly, find things that crawl, show me skipping, etc.), and describe what you see (i.e., “look it’s at the animal with feathers, who flies, and who will probably be laying eggs soon”).
Reading
Read together! For older readers, a good chapter book might even be in order. This gives ample opportunity to talk about and work on comprehension of the different parts of the book (i.e., the main character(s), the setting, etc.). It’s a great time to point out and examine new vocabulary further. You can talk about specific words in the book, the meaning of those words, what are other words that might mean the same thing, what are words that are the opposite, what other words might be associated with the specific word, etc. For our younger readers, this is also a great time to look at the pictures in the book and talk about what you see. You can also work on hearing and saying the sounds in specific words in the book, and you can work on comprehension and understanding of what was just read.
Higher Tech Options for Speech Therapy at Home
There’s a 30 day free trial for this educational website. It’s great for children between kindergarten and 2nd grade. Give it a try!
You can have a free subscription to this website if your school has been impacted by a closure. There’s also a free 30 day trial. Vooks takes normal story books, animates them, and makes them come alive! It’s really a great resource!
Boom Learning is full of gamified academic exercises including those that target speech and language! Try the starter package. It’s free and you’ll find a ton of really great exercises for your child!
Low Tech ideas for Occupational Therapy at home:
- Use that backyard swing set! Engage sensory systems with swinging, monkey bars, teeter totter, and going down the slide!
- Sensory play – we’re big fans of Floof and Kinetic Sand at my house. This could also be as simple as dumping flour in a casserole dish and driving cars through it or mixing water and cornstarch together.
- Cook together – stirring, mixing, measuring – cooking targets so many excellent skills areas – cognition, attention to task, sequencing, bilateral coordination. Plus the end result is yummy!
High Tech ideas for OT :
Tools to Grow OT : This website offers two levels of activities – both free and membership options. Tools to Grow breaks down activities by skills targeted – such as fine motor skills, visual motor integration, sensory processing, and bilateral coordination.
Best Apps for screen time :
- Dexteria – fine motor skill development
- Dexteria Dots – fine motor development with some math
- Dexteria VMI – visual motor integration skills
- Doodle Buddy – a fun drawing app
- Little Finder – this one targets visual perception skills
- Osmo Tangram – more visual perception skills
- Letter Reflex – great for working on letter reversals
- Sensory Sound Box – a calming visual and auditory app you can control by touch