Resources For Parents of a Child in Occupational Therapy
Your child’s occupational therapist will be the biggest advocate on your child’s team. Use them as a resource! However, I wanted to offer resources here as well. These are great places to start when it comes to discovering tools, strategies, and specific activities that can help your child. I’ve had many parents of kids receiving therapy tell me that they’ve passed information and resources from this site onto their therapists. I’ve also had many therapists tell me that they’ve found this site because of a parent’s recommendation or request to work on specific areas of need. This is your starting space to find the resources and tools that will best serve your child.
Executive Function Resources for Parents
Below you’ll find resources for activities, strategies to address attention, impulse control, planning, prioritization, organization, problem solving and other brain-related challenges that impact learning and accomplishing chores or daily tasks at home.
- How to Help Kids with Messy, Disorganized Homework
- Toys and Games to Improve Executive Function
- How to help kids get “unstuck” and plan, prioritize so they can get things done
- Impulse Control for Kids
- Kindergarten Readiness and Executive Functioning Skills
- Books for Parents to Learn about Executive Functioning
- How to help kids think ahead
Fine Motor Resources for Parents
Below you’ll find specific activities designed to help kids develop stronger hands so they can manipulate toys and clothing fasteners…or have enough endurance to color a picture without complaining their hands are tired…or have strong fingers that can hold the pencil so they can write neatly and so you can read their handwriting.
- What are fine motor skills and why does my kid need to develop them?
- Activities to Improve Hand Strength
- Fun Crafts that Build Fine Motor Skills
- How Should Fine Motor Skills develop? Use blocks to help!
Occupations Of Kids…Resources for Parents to Help Kids Become More Independent
Below you’ll find resources to help your child build independence in their daily tasks like getting themselves dressed, tying their shoes, learning to type, potty training, staying safe in the community, and all of the exact ways that parents want their children to grow and learn.
- How to help kids learn to dress themselves
- Teach kids to tie their own shoes
- Potty training special needs kids
- Teach kids to use a zipper
- Teach kids to button
- Teaching kids to type
- Teach kids to cut with scissors
- Teach skills with cooking!
Below you’ll find resources and specific strategies to help kids write on the lines, space between words, form letters accurately, learn cursive writing, so they can write independency and so you and others can read their writing.
- Build a Better Pencil Grasp with Play
- How to Teach Kids to Write Letters
- Teach Kids to Write on the Lines
- Teach Kids to Space Between Words
- What Therapists Want Parents to Know About Pencil Grasp
- How to Teach Cursive Writing
Below are resources to help your child manage their behaviors, emotions, and all things “sensory”. OTs help kids tolerate and accommodate for sensory input like that scratchy tag on their clothes or their hatred for the sock seam on their feet. They can help kids with the tools they need for picky eating, specific sounds, or other sensory issues. Therapists can help you create a sensory diet that works and that kids actually want to do. There is so much to sensory and you can find activities and tools to help.
- How to Create a Sensory Diet
- What is Sensory Processing Disorder?
- Sensory Play Ideas for Babies
- Sensory Play Ideas for Kids
- Sensory Friendly Clothing
- Sensory Meltdown or Tantrum…which is it?
- Eating and Food Textures: Is it Sensory or Oral Motor?
- Sensory Coping Strategies for Kids
Below is information on what’s going on behind trouble with reading, coordination troubles, or even math. Did you know that vision is related to all these things? It’s true! Here, you’ll find your way on how to help your child with visual perceptual skills, visual motor skills, eye-hand coordination, and even motor planning! Wondering what these words even mean and how they relate to your kiddo? We’ve got you covered!
- How Vision Impacts Learning
- Vision Problems You Can Not “See”
- What are Visual Motor Skills?
- Visual Motor Skills Milestones
- What is Visual Perception?
Information provided by The OT Toolbox.