Lego Building Match

There are several reasons that we love incorporating building with blocks into therapy, classroom, and home routines. Block play is such an important foundation of early childhood learning, and can target so many developmental goals. Plus, who doesn’t love to knock over the tower when you are done building….classic fun times!

Here are some of the many benefits of block play:

• Strengthens motor skills and hand/eye coordination

• Strengthens fine motor manipulation skills

• Strengthens pincer grasp

• Builds graded precision of movements

• Builds spatial reasoning

• Helps children learn to balance objects in space

• Helps with motor planning skills

• Encourages imaginative play

• Foundation for early mathematical concepts (size, shape, counting)

• Provides a means for appropriate destructive play (great outlet for those sensory seekers)

• Encourages teamwork

• Builds problem solving skills

• Strengthens visual perceptual skills

• Introduces the concept of gravity

• Encourages speech production

• Can be used to help with following directions

Honestly, we could go on and on about blocks….they are the coolest! While we think open-ended free play with blocks is AMAZING, we also love to incorporate structured block play into our therapy sessions. One of our favorite activities is to build a tower, and have the child build a matching tower. We often start small with only 2 blocks at a time, and work up to more complicated towers. We also love giving the child a turn to build a tower that we have to copy to make it even more fun. This is a great game to incorporate into home learning routines! Our amazing Occupational Therapy Team put together a fun free printable based on matching block towers. The great thing about this is it is also a coloring page, so if you don’t have blocks available at home right now kids can also work on matching the correct colors. Click here for the FREE block worksheet, and happy building!!

Scavenger Hunt

While we are all spending most of our time at home lately, that does not mean that daily outside walks are canceled! We put together this fun outdoor scavenger hunt activity to take with you on your next family walk (while practicing social distancing of course).

Spotted the fire hydrant!

Taking a marker along is a fun way to sneak in some fine motor practice as well. He rocked his check marks!

The great thing about scavenger hunts, is they really get kids to pay attention to the details of their environment. Searching for the items on the list is a great way to challenge visual scanning and boost their observational skills. Don’t forget to take a marker along so they can check off their finds as you go! This can also be a fun activity to incorporate with speech goals. As you walk work on pointing towards objects, identifying them, practice making their noises, or talk about colors. This activity is so great to tailor to your child’s current speech level. For an extra challenge celebrate each find with an exercise (try jumping jacks, frog jumps, or marching in place). Such a fun way to take advantage of movement time outdoors, while encouraging learning and talking in a relaxed and natural environment. To make searching even more exciting check out our post on how to make binoculars out of recycled toilet paper rolls, this will help kids get excited about searching!

If outdoor walks are not available to your family at the moment, we also created an indoor scavenger hunt option for you. You can still work on all these skills indoors or while looking out the window! Happy searching!! Click here for our scavenger hunt pages.

So proud of all of his finds today! The bunny might take a few walks to find, but we will be keeping our eyes out.

Introducing DKT Blog

During this COVID-19 closure, we have really been missing seeing all of our kiddos and connecting with families in person. While we love our virtual sessions, we thought that starting a small blog might be another way to keep in touch during this time. Meddy Teddy has been hard at work thinking up some ideas for at home therapy fun! Stay tuned for more!