Don’t Break the Ice! This is a favorite for kids of many ages, easily adjusted to a variety of skills levels. It can be a great way to introduce turn-taking and playing games with rules in a fun and silly way.

Areas of Development:

• Communication: This can be a great time to work on the concept of “your turn” vs. “my turn,” while engaged in play. Pairing gestural cues with your words can help your child understand the concept and begin to pair the words with that concept. For kids with higher level language, you can ask questions about what is happening in the game as opposed to narrating for them.
• Gross Motor: Promote postural control and proximal shoulder stability by encouraging your child to lay on their belly while playing this game. It can be helpful to model this position, laying on your belly while playing as well! Your child may need some additional tactile cues (hand on their back or hips) to help maintain this position for longer intervals. If your child is a mover, you can incorporate movement into each turn, having to “earn” the hammer back by performing a short gross motor task, such as jumping up and down 5 times or rolling across the floor.
• Fine Motor: Don’t Break the Ice is a great game to work on fine motor control and gradation of force. Using the small hammer helps promote isolated wrist movement, an important skill for self-feeding and utensil use. Encourage your child to use only one hand at a time to grasp the hammer.
• Social Emotional: This is a simple cause-and-effect game with rules and turn-taking. While it may take a few trials, this is a fun way to teach your child to wait for their turn while promoting joint attention through play. Use of high affect and slightly exaggerated reactions can help draw your child in and promote participation.
• Cognition: This game is called “Don’t Break the Ice,” although it can be so very fun to break the ice. Understanding the concept of “don’t” and how to win the game is a great way to practice this concept. You can also work on counting how many blocks fall each round, modeling for your child. It can be helpful to line up the blocks to promote counting from left to right to increase accuracy.

Upgrade: Have your child play with another child or sibling. Having three people play means you will need to wait longer for each turn and also have a higher chance of being the one to break the ice if force gradation is a challenge. This can help your child target frustration tolerance, patience, and turn-taking. You can also have your child restack the “ice” blocks into the stand to increase the challenge between each round.

Downgrade: If your child isn’t ready for turn-taking or for gameplay with specific rules, you can adjust the game while still targeting many skills. Start by encouraging your child to hold the hammer and knocking down the blocks. You can then have your child “earn” the hammer back by completing gross motor activities (refer to gross motor section). Work on sustained attention to task, working towards turn-taking and understanding the original rules of the game.

Additional Games:

• Feed the Woozle
• Yeti in My Spaghetti
• Porcupine Pop
• Tumblin’ Monkeys

Movement songs are a quick and easy way to get your child moving inside when it’s cold outside! The use of videos can help the whole family learn the moves and pair the words with those movements. As you and your child begin to learn the songs, try turning the iPad around and dancing to the songs without the video! Check out this page for a list of great songs.

Areas of Development:

• Communication: Music targets communication in many ways and can be easier for your child to attend to. Model singing along with the songs, as well as singing them without the video, to help foster your child’s understanding of the words and the actions paired with those words.
• Fine Motor: Gross motor development works hand-in-hand with fine motor development. Skills such as imitating actions, crossing midline, clapping, and hand movements (think Baby Shark) can help promote foundational fine motor skills in a fun and engaging way!
• Gross Motor: Movement songs are a great way to target many skills vital to gross motor development, such as body awareness, motor imitation skills, and coordination skills. Movement songs are a fun way to provide structured movement breaks with the “demands” coming from the ever-appealing iPad, promoting engagement and participation.
• Social-Emotional: Music is a great way to promote joint attention with our kids. Engaging in the moments with your child can provide that model while also promoting the shared joy of silly movements.
• Cognition: You can help your child work on following commands and verbal directives through song! Some movement songs get faster as they go, requiring faster reaction time (Stand Up, Sit Down). They also add additional steps and movements, challenging your child’s verbal and movement processing.

Upgrade: Once your child has mastered movement songs, you can progress to yoga. Yoga for kids is a great way to work on breath control, postural stability, and overall strengthening, as it requires your child to hold various positions for longer periods of time through isometric movements. Use of yoga cards such as Yogarilla or The ABCs of Yoga for Kids can help you grow your moves! You can also use apps such as “Super Stretch,” which provides a video of children engaged in the poses. Once your child is more familiar with the poses, you can challenge them to complete the pose without even watching the video!

Downgrade: Have a dance party with your favorite song and encourage your child to freestyle! Jumping around and moving with you, even in an unstructured way, is a great way to build engagement and joint attention. Dancing and singing along to a song is a great way to work on stamina and endurance, promote regulation, and have a great time with your family!

Related Links:

• Super Stretch
• Yogarilla
• ABC Yoga for Kids

Looking for something to do with minimal prep work? Printing out worksheets targeted towards your child’s skill level can help development across the board with minimal set up or clean up. It is also a great way to promote school readiness.  

• Level I Worksheets (Tracing Lines 1 and Tracing Lines 2) 

• Level 2 Worksheets (Connect the Dots) 

• Color by Number

Areas of Development: 

• Communication: Use simple language narrating the activity. Model expansion of the child’s verbal output by adding 1-2 words. Examples include labeling colors “red” and with direction “up” then pairing the two together “red goes up!” This helps promote attention to the task, along with communication development. You can also label what you see on the worksheet (I see a snowman!) and encourage your child to do the same (I.e. “what do you see?”).   
• Fine Motor: Maintaining grasp on a writing utensil promotes fine motor control and academic readiness. Use of a marker, paint, and paintbrush with large handle, or bulky, round piece of chalk provides little resistance while writing and more surface area for your child to hold, making it easier for your child to successfully mark the paper. Utilizing a short crayon or pencil provides increased resistance while writing and increased challenge to maintain grasp patterns while working to increase the accuracy of writing and pre-writing strokes. 
• Gross Motor: Postural control and proximal stability is the primary focus in the gross motor domain while engaged in tabletop tasks such as completing worksheets. Ensure your child has upright posture while completing these tasks, with feet flat on the ground and the table at an appropriate height. You can provide verbal or tactile cues to remind your child to keep their head off the table. For an increased challenge, you can tape the worksheet to the wall at your child’s eye level or have your child lay on their stomach propped up on both elbows. This increases the challenge, targeting upper extremity strengthening and postural control while changing the demand of sitting at a table.
• Social-Emotional: Turn-taking and joint attention are the foundational skills for social-emotional development and can be incorporated into many tasks. Passing the marker back and forth, switching colors, or trading types of writing utensils are great ways to target turn-taking. You can start with parallel play (each working on your own worksheet in the same space) and work towards taking turns completing the same worksheet, promoting flexibility, turn-taking, and sustained attention to tasks.
• Cognition: Engagement in worksheets is great for targeting the sequencing of steps, sustained attention, and problem solving when presented with a novel task. Encourage your child to complete steps of the worksheet in an organized way, beginning at the top left of the page and working your way across. Promoting sequencing from top to bottom and left to right coincides with pre-literacy skills. 

Downgrade the Activity: Is your child not writing yet? Promote functional scribble! Use a large piece of paper on a vertical surface and encourage drawing a rainbow, with a long arching line. Encourage long, fluid strokes while standing in the center of the paper or drawing surface, promoting those foundational skills for writing! These include bilateral coordination, crossing midline, visual attention, and proximal stability. 

Engaging in tactile or “messy” play is essential for the development of fine motor skills and discrimination between textures, helping our kids understand the world around them. DIY Slime is a fun activity to keep your kids entertained with a fun, sticky toy at the end! You can also throw it in a ziplock bag (making sure to tape the edges shut to contain the mess) and you have a portable fidget! You can make it winter themed by dying the slime blue while making it, adding glitter, or adding snowflake sequins or beads.

Click here for a simple guide on how to make your own.

Areas of Development:  

• Communication: Follow your child’s lead, and work to expand their output of communication with modeling of action words or descriptive words. Modeling simple, one to two-word labels can help promote language development during play.  
• Fine Motor: To increase the fine motor challenge with slime, try pushing beads into the slime and pulling them back out. This is a great way to work on functional grasp patterns, arch development, discrimination between sides of the hand, and opening of the thumb web space.  
• Gross Motor: Positioning while engaged in play on the floor is a great way to incorporate strengthening into functional play. Encourage your child to sit up without leaning or have them lay on their belly propped on their elbows. Be sure to encourage your child to keep their head up to promote full-body strengthening! 
• Social-Emotional: Use of silly sounds while engaged in play (“squish!”) can help promote joint attention between you and your child. Holding the slime up near your face can promote eye contact and interaction while engaged in play. Parallel play, modeling, and following your child’s lead is a great way to address those foundational skills of social interaction.  
• Cognition: While making the slime, your child can practice following a recipe, gathering ingredients, and attending to a task. Challenge them further by asking them what step or ingredient comes next, allowing them to take the lead. This targets sequencing, working memory, and following directions, essential skills to promote problem-solving, and independence in novel tasks.  

If you want to upgrade the difficulty level of the activity:

Incorporate a breath control activity into the tactile play with slime. Use a straw to blow bubbles into the slime, creating an exciting visual effect. This promotes oral motor skills such as lip closure and breath control and makes it more difficult for your child to suck the material back through the straw into their mouth, as can happen with water and soap. If that’s still too easy, challenge your child to hum their favorite song while blowing the bubbles, providing high-intensity oral input. It also requires sustained breath control, a skill that contributes to self-regulation.