OT Bag: Ancient Egypt
I spent last year practicing in a great school system with a terrific and experienced group of OT practitioners. One of the ideas that they had is that each person creates a themed bag of activities, which you keep for a week and then pass on. It's great, since you get 2 months worth of activities for just developing one plan. This is what was in a bag I created for April/May on Ancient Egypt.
It came with these nifty hieroglyphic stamps and phonetic instructions so you can make words. This would have made a great cotreat with a speech therapist because sounding out the letters for their names was really hard for most kids. Usually, I would circle on the sheet which stamps were needed instead of having the kid determine whether they had a short or long vowel in their name or a SH instead of an S. It was still a visual perceptual challenge for the kids to scan among the stamps for the correct pieces.
I included other items so that there was variability for ages and activities needed to achieve goals. There were Egyptian "medallions" in bird shape on card stock to practice cutting and tying; coloring sheets that could be used with pyramid crayons; and a pyramid that required cutting, folding and taping to construct. 
We had a game at the office that requires you to move a marker through a maze using a magnet underneath the maze board.
Some of the items that I included didn't work out as well. I made my own cryptogram about King Tut on a website, but failed to notice that there weren't many letters that repeated, so it was very laborious for the kids. I had pages on complete and incomplete Pascal's Triangles (I enjoy dorky math type things) for kids to do simple addition and color in the even and odd numbers with different colors (try it, it makes a pattern!). However, even the older kids I worked with struggled mightily with the simple addition concepts and did not know odds/evens, so this did not go anywhere. The complex folding and taping required for the pyramid construction was also pretty hard for most. However, judging by what I read on other blogs and the IEPs I saw from other districts, I think that my kids on caseload (who were being mainstreamed) were generally lower functioning than others getting OT, so these items may work for you with your kids in a graded manner.
Overall, I enjoyed making this bag and trying to instill a little love for learning about ancient Egyptian culture with my kids, though it didn't necessarily work out as planned.
We had a game at the office that requires you to move a marker through a maze using a magnet underneath the maze board.
Some of the items that I included didn't work out as well. I made my own cryptogram about King Tut on a website, but failed to notice that there weren't many letters that repeated, so it was very laborious for the kids. I had pages on complete and incomplete Pascal's Triangles (I enjoy dorky math type things) for kids to do simple addition and color in the even and odd numbers with different colors (try it, it makes a pattern!). However, even the older kids I worked with struggled mightily with the simple addition concepts and did not know odds/evens, so this did not go anywhere. The complex folding and taping required for the pyramid construction was also pretty hard for most. However, judging by what I read on other blogs and the IEPs I saw from other districts, I think that my kids on caseload (who were being mainstreamed) were generally lower functioning than others getting OT, so these items may work for you with your kids in a graded manner.
Overall, I enjoyed making this bag and trying to instill a little love for learning about ancient Egyptian culture with my kids, though it didn't necessarily work out as planned.
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