One of our OT’s adapted this animal book into an OT activity for her kids. She took the book and photocopied and laminated each page and then added velcro to them so they would match up. Just to warn you it makes the book much harder to close once all of the pictures are in there so you may want to store them in a separate bag to help preserve the life of the book. When I asked our OT what she used the book for she quickly listed off the following reasons:
- bilateral skills to stabilize the book with a helper hand and try to take the picture on or off
- hand and upper extremity strengthening for the kids that have a hard time separating the velcro pieces
- visual perception/processing for matching the correct pictures to each other
I am sure there are other great uses as well from an OT standpoint but I wanted to figure out a way to work it into my session!
Obviously I could use it like a toy with multiple pieces and have them repeat whatever task I am having them do while they get each animal picture to put back in the book. I decided to use it for an animal walk and imagination game. I took out all of the pictures and turned them upside down on the carpet. The little girl had to pick one and then she had to go around the room doing her best imitation of that animal. I’ll tell you we had to get creative for some animals. We collectively decided that the guinea pig liked to roll around like a roly poly and that fish slithered along the ground (we were pretending to swim). It was a great way for her to work on motor planning, strengthening and her imagination!
Although I’m not a speech therapist I would imagine that you could use this tool for encouraging sounds (since we had to make the noise of each animal as well) and for matching, site words and picture identification. I would also love to make it into a memory game so that whatever page the book opened to you had to try to remember where that card was in the rows of turned over cards!
What every day items have you adapted into a game or tool that serves multiple purposes?
