30+ Teletherapy activities for Spring and St. Patrick’s Day
Looking to save time planning your teletherapy sessions this March? Find over 30 ideas and links to screen share during your teletherapy sessions to improve your student’s fine motor, visual motor, visual perceptual, gross motor, motor planning, and handwriting skills. Ideas to fit with themes of Spring, St. Patrick’s Day, Read Across America Day, and even March Madness. Helpful for Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists, Speech Therapists, and teachers working with preschool through middle school students.
There are so many fun themes to choose from in the month of March. St. Patrick’s Day, March madness, Spring, and Read Across America day!
I’m an old-school therapist so I like to limit the amount of time my student’s are “on-screen” for activities.
My typical sessions involve:
Moving our bodies first
Warming up our fingers
Activity of the day and instruction on a new/continued skill
Writing, typing, assistive tech practice
A game (if time permits)
My half-hour sessions fly by and I’m always wanting more time!
How to use these Teletherapy activities
Check out this post if you’re wanting to learn more about how to structure your teletherapy sessions and how to prepare your families and students for teletherapy sessions if you’re a newbie.
Save the links below to your bookmarks or put them in a folder that you can easily find during sessions.
I like to open the links I’ll be using in my sessions and have them in a separate tab so I can easily copy and paste them into my therapy platform.
Teletherapy activities to work on visual memory
You can check out this post for more info on how I use these memory games in my session.
St. Patrick’s Day memory game #1-The traditional version of matching 2 pictures.
St. Patricks’s Day memory game #2-The traditional version of matching 2 pictures.
St. Patrick’s Day match the vocabulary-Match the picture to the word.
St. Patrick’s Day-spatial concepts- This one works on concepts of over, under, between, on.
Spring memory game #1-Has both the picture and the word on each card so great for adding some writing practice.
Spring memory game #2-This one has the picture and words too!
Read across America memory game #1-how many Dr. Suess books can you identify.
Read across America memory game #2
Teletherapy activities to work on visual perceptual skills
For ideas on how to grade these word searches up and down, check out this post!
These Spot the difference games are great to work on visual discrimination skills.
Visual discrimination is the ability to identify and recognize the likeness and differences of shapes, forms, colors, and positions of objects.
Visual discrimination skills are important for academic skills of reading, writing and math.
When children struggle with visual discrimination skills, they may mistake the letter “h” for letter “n” and then the word hat becomes nat, which can really impact their ability to read.
Try these games to work on visual discrimination skills:
Shamrock and Horseshoe spot the difference
Puzzles are another great way to work on visual perceptual skills including:
Visual Attention: The ability to focus on important visual information and filter out unimportant background information.
Visual Memory: The ability to recall visual traits of a form or object.
Visual Spatial Relationships: Understanding the relationships of objects within the environment.
Visual Figure Ground: The ability to locate something in a busy background.
Visual Form Constancy: The ability to know that a form or shape is the same, even if it has been made smaller/larger or has been turned around.
Visual Closure: The ability to recognize a form or object when part of the picture is missing.
Here are a few online puzzles to fit with some March themes.
Digipuzzle.net-St. Patrick’s day digital games-so many games to choose from. Lots of games to work on visual memory, pattern recognition, and a variety of executive functioning skills.
Teletherapy activities to work on handwriting
I love having a list of writing prompts readily available for the month.
Sometimes I’ll have the students spin a spinner to reveal their writing prompt of the day or roll the virtual dice and practice some math too!
Here is a list of 53 Spring writing prompts
MadLibs is another great writing activity, especially for those student’s with a good sense of humor!
Cat in the hat bingo game-I uploaded this printable from totschooling.net and paired it with a virtual dice. We practiced writing words that started with the letter that was rolled. Older students can practice writing that word in a sentence either by handwriting, typing, or use of speech to text.
Teletherapy activities to work on fine motor and visual-motor skills
Guided drawing works on so many great fine motor, visual motor, and even visual perceptual skills and is a fun way to work on those important foundational writing skills.
I like to add some writing practice at the end and have my students come up with a story about their drawing.
Teletherapy activities to work on gross motor skills and brain breaks
Here are some fun movement videos to use as a brain break or as a warm-up at the beginning of your teletherapy sessions.
You can also find them here on my YouTube channel playlist for easier access during your teletherapy sessions.
If you prefer a no-video option try these poses from Kids Yoga Stories
Low-prep March craft activities
Draw some shamrocks and practice cutting them out.
Tear little pieces of green paper and glue onto shamrock drawing (image courtesy of Kristie’s notes)
Make rainbow bracelets using pipe cleaners and fruit loops or beads.
Download a copy of this adorable Dr. Suess “Oh the places you’ll go” craft by Fun in First to work on coloring, cutting, and writing.
What’s your favorite Teletherapy activity?
I wanna hear from you on what’s working in your teletherapy sessions. If you’ve had great success using one of these activities or something else, please share with us down below.
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