Self care skills are your “daily living” activities including dressing, toothbrushing, eating, and toileting. It is so important to encourage and promote independence with these skills! As a pediatric Occupational Therapist, we often address and work these skills with kids, but sometimes this can be boring and not so fun to practice. Luckily there are some amazing toys and games on the market that I have used to work on self care skills and are FUN!!! Here are some of my favorites:
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Crazy Cereal Game
This is a great game for kids who are working on scooping skills with a spoon. The spoon lights up a color and your child needs to scoop that color into the smaller bowl. This is a fun game for fine motor and visual motor skills and also works on color identification and counting as well…..a perfect pre school aged game! I love that the spoon is built up, perfect for smaller sized hands. Please be careful as the pieces are a choking hazard and should not be played with kids who mouth items.
Melissa & Doug Cutting Food Set
This is a wonderful toy for learning early food cutting skills! I love that it can be incorporated into imaginative play with kitchen/food activities and sneaks in some fine motor and hand strengthening skill development. I love also that it can be graded and younger kids can start with pulling apart the velcro food items and then can work up to using the play knife and cutting board to cut apart the food items. This is a great activity for working on bilateral hand skills (your two hands working together,) fine motor, and hand strengthening skills. It also incorporates some visual skill development for putting the food pieces back together.
Melissa & Doug Wooden Basic Skills Board
I have often used this puzzle in obstacle courses and it works on fastener management skills for dressing. Start with practicing these skills on a flat surface and then work up to on clothing for improved ease. Also, start with unbuttoning, unsnapping, and zipping, and then move onto buttoning and then snapping. Tying laces can be pretty tricky so I don’t recommend practicing this until kindergarten aged, but with this puzzle you can work on putting the laces through the holes. I love that they even have a Mickey and Minnie version of this puzzle and a bear option as well!
Crocodile Teeth Game
I like to use this game with practicing tooth brushing skills. First we will use a dry toothbrush and work on brushing all the teeth (top left, top right, top middle, bottom left, bottom right, bottom middle) and then play the game,a fun way to incorporate learning how to brush teeth thoroughly!
Play-Doh Doctor Drill ‘n Fill Set
Using play-doh is a great hand strengthening activity! I love that this set incorporates a tooth brushing theme and as with the crocodile dentist above, you can have your kids practice brushing teeth on the model mouth once teeth are made with play-doh. Kids also love the electric drill with this set!
Dress up Costumes
Playing dress up is a wonderful way to practice more independence with dressing skills while having fun with imaginative play! There are so many dress up costumes, above are just a few ideas.
Dressing Dolls
There are many different varieties of these dolls, so choose one that may suit your child’s interests. I like that this works on early fastener management skills with use of large buttons, velcro, zippers, and even a belt! You can incorporate these into play by taking care of your doll. Also, you can practice dressing any baby dolls at home by using older baby clothes. I saved some of my daughter’s newborn and 3 month old clothes and they fit her dolls well, which is also nice for managing zippers and snaps with onsies and donning/doffing other clothing.
Books
I love using books to support activities and skills I am working on! I use my Pete the Cat book regularly in preschool classes when we are practicing button skills, kids love Pete!
Educational Insights Koala Capers Game
This is a cute early game for preschool aged kids to roll dice to match patterns on the dice to clothing pieces and dress your Koala. This is fun for early visual scanning and visual perceptual skills, but you can also practice with actually putting on “sample” clothing (shirts and pants) when you roll the dice to dress the Koala, an easy way to sneak in some dressing skills practice!
I hope you have found these ideas helpful for integrating play with practice of self care skills!
by Kim Heyer OTR/L