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| Rainbow Trees |
Autumn Leaves Are Falling Down... Fall has arrived and for the past few weeks my students have been welcoming Fall in many fun and festive ways! The leaves on the trees are Falling down all around our school and leaves are probably one of my favorite things to incorporate into treatment activities because there are so many ways to discover their beauty. My students are always excited to explore the different shapes and vibrant colors of red, yellow, orange and brown, the textures of soft, rough and crunchy and the smells of nature:)  |
| Exploring Fall Leaves |
If you have time, you can venture outside and find a variety of leaves that have fallen from the trees outside or make a visit to the store to buy some fabric leaves. Fabric leaves are great because they are easy clean-up and can be re-used for many Fall seasons to come. I dump the leaves in a large water table (a bucket or tray would work well too) so my students can explore and play in the leaves, feeling the different textures and scents. You can even hide different manipulatives in the leaves, such as plastic farm animals or bugs, sensory balls or other fidgets to find.
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| Exploring Fall Leaves |
My students love to jump and roll in the leaves too! The kids love jumping on the trampoline or bouncing/rolling on the therapy ball while the leaves fall overhead. With facilitation for safety, the students are able to reach to the ground for the leaves, pick them up and then watch them fall. My students love parachute activities so it is fun to take turns sitting in the middle of the parachute (on top) with the leaves all around and as the parachute moves the leaves swish and swoosh all around. While laying on top of the parachute the students can roll side to side in the leaves. These sensorimotor activities are not only fun but also encourage peer interaction, body awareness, gross motor coordination, balance, motor planning and sequencing.
Some Fall Favorites:
Autumn Leaves
(sing to the tune: 'London bridges')
(sing to the tune: 'London bridges')
Autumn leave are falling down,
falling down, falling down
Autumn leaves are falling down,
falling to the ground.
Pick them up and watch them fall,
watch them fall, watch them fall
Pick them up and watch them fall,
it's so much fun!
The Leaves on the Trees
('The Wheels on the Bus')
('The Wheels on the Bus')
The leaves on the trees are falling down,
falling down, falling down.
The leaves on the trees are falling down,
all through the town!
The leaves on the trees go swish, swish, swish
swish, swish, swish
swish, swish, swish
The leaves on the trees go swish, swish, swish
all through the town!
The leaves on the ground go crunch, crunch, crunch
crunch, crunch, crunch
crunch, crunch, crunch
The leaves on the ground go crunch, crunch, crunch
all through the town!
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| Rainbow Tree |
My students had a blast creating these magical rainbow trees for Fall. These beautiful little trees are a fun way to incorporate both fine motor and visual-motor integration skills, including: cutting, pasting, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, counting, and ordinal sequencing (largest to smallest). The tree trunks were cut from recycled newspaper and each student got to pick 4 to 5 large circles in their favorite colors to cut. After the largest (biggest) circles were cut and pasted on branches, the medium sized circles and smallest circles were introducted and pasted in place. For my students working on written communication, they were given time to write sentences about their rainbow beauties:)
My students had a blast creating these magical rainbow trees for Fall. These beautiful little trees are a fun way to incorporate both fine motor and visual-motor integration skills, including: cutting, pasting, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, counting, and ordinal sequencing (largest to smallest). The tree trunks were cut from recycled newspaper and each student got to pick 4 to 5 large circles in their favorite colors to cut. After the largest (biggest) circles were cut and pasted on branches, the medium sized circles and smallest circles were introducted and pasted in place. For my students working on written communication, they were given time to write sentences about their rainbow beauties:)
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| The Magical Rainbow Forest |
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| Leaf Matching |
As I explained in my previous post (Apples), I try to incorporate a lot of visual-motor integration skills into my treatment sessions, matching, lacing, tracing, connect the dots, mazes, printing, etc. Matching games are a great way to work on not only visual-motor skills but also hand-eye coordination, visual-scanning and discrimination skills and fine motor control. My students absolutely love matching and I have found it to be an easy to use and adapt activity that is effective in encouraging visual-motor integration skill development. Of course, I explored the web to find images of leaves so I could make some matching boards. Unfortunately, I am unsure where I found my images for these matching boards because I made them last year but if you just Google search 'leaf matching' you will find a ton of great images to use with different colors, patterns and shapes. Like I said before, matching boards take a while to make but they are so worth the effort and time because they prove to be a perfect warm-up table top activity and if laminated they can be sanitized and stored for school years to come:)
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| Leaf Matching |
Lauren
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