OT FUN at Home
Have you ever played Thin Ice? If you haven’t, it’s a super fun game and I would highly recommend playing with your elementary aged children. If you’re interested, you can either buy the game or use these simple instructions to make the game at home!
A small (but doable) challenge with telehealth is making sure that the activities can be done together, but separately (virtually). With this game, the family just needed to gather a cup, tissue (toilet paper or paper towel can also work), tongs (kitchen tongs will work!), water, marbles (stones, coins, small rocks from outside), and a rubber band (or hair tie).
To set up, I pulled the tissue apart so it was one ply (and an opportunity to play this game twice using only one tissue!) and placed it on the cup. I took the rubber band and secured the tissue around the mouth of the cup using the rubber band. I then filled a bowl with water and placed my stones in the water. The idea is to use the tongs to carefully place the wet stones on top of the tissue before the tissue breaks from the water and weight. We played to see how many we could get on top, but you can make this a win/lose game if that’s more motivating! Bonus-easy clean up, all the stones fall into the cup! While I used one ply of a tissue, if your child has a harder time, you can always play with a full tissue/paper towel.
This was a game that I played with my elementary aged children during telehealth and this is a great way to work on fine motor strength/endurance and using slow, controlled movements. The same skills necessary for writing. This is a great game to play before writing tasks to warm up those hand muscles. This is also a great game to play on it’s own if that’s more preferred!
Stay safe and enjoy!