Does anybody have a brown thumb, like me? Then maybe Build A Garden is the route you need to take - build an indoor garden that never needs tending.  Build A Garden comes in several different boxed sets, each with a different number of pieces. I have the set in the image above and it comes with 98 pieces, all hard plastic. I'm going to show you the contents of the box first, as it will be easier to explain after. I enlarged the image above so that you can see the details on the blooms. There are four different flower parts, and the names are even printed on the box. The largest p ..read more

What's in Ned's Head?  Without looking, feel for the icky, sticky, hairy and scary stuff inside. There's almost no limit to the surprises that you can find in What's in Ned's Head? Use it with the objects that are included and then let your imagination run wild as you put all kinds of everyday objects in for more fun and extended play. Objects included in the game may vary a little as I have seen different things over the years in What's in Ned's Head?  including a frog, dirty gym sock, sticky sucker, lab rat, tongue, tooth, worm, bird poop with a worm in it, dirty diaper ..read more

  I have long been a fan of the Pass The Pigs games. Now that I am retired, I don't get to go looking for new games. Of course Amazon doesn't know that I'm retired, so they keep adding new games to my feed. This is one of them and I couldn't help but go look.  The thing I like about the three Pass The Pig games that I own, is the tiny size of the pigs and the score pad. Lots of hand skills can be addressed with these games. I will put links to those three games below. Each one has ideas on using them in therapy. The thing that is intriguing to me about this set, is the overly large ..read more

Bunny Boo - 60 challenges that increase in difficulty Bunny Boo is a Smart Game for beginners to help teach, among other things, logic reasoning and problem solving. There are not a lot of games of this type for individuals with a moderate cognitive disability, and this one comes with 60 challenges! Bunny Boo is a fun activity for beginners to also work on spatial orientation, visual closure, and building a 3D model from a 2D pattern card. There are only four pieces and they are pictured in the challenges from the top, the side, the front, or the back. You will be able to see ea ..read more

Wooden Pizza Party - Life-sized wooden hand tools Melissa & Doug have a lot of different wooden food sets, like Wooden Pizza Party, that are great for creative play. They all include numerous pieces and most even include hand tools, making them also a favorite with OTs. The pieces are all wood and typically well constructed. Wooden Pizza Party is no exception.  The pizza pieces stick together with round Velcro tabs, and the pizza toppings stick on the pizza with Velcro, three toppings per slice. You can see a white, round piece of Velcro on the side of the piece of pizza th ..read more

Pizza Pile-Up - Don't add one too many toppings Do you work with kids that have trouble with a graded release? That aren't able to open their hand and gently put something down? That's when I bring out the balance games. They always start with modeling, cueing, and usually hand-over-hand to get the feel of slowly, purposefully opening the hand to release something. After practice, many kids are successful.  With that said, Pizza Pile-Up is NOT one of those games that I would use for this purpose. Yes, it is a balance game, but the rubbery ingredients slide across the p ..read more

Use a hammer and tacks to construct cars and trucks from challenge cards.  A little pricey, but a fun activity. Construct vehicles by placing pieces on a cork board and then hammering in tacks to keep them in place.   The pieces are a lightweight wood with a picture on one side. One piece requires two tacks and the rest only take one. There are circles on the pieces to indicate where the tacks go. The tacks are not long enough to go all the way through the cork board, so won't scratch the table. The hammer is also wooden.    The five challenge cards are a heavy card st ..read more

Q This is a visual perceptual trio that is a good investment, IMHO. I have used these games for years and I keep using them for many reasons: You can work on developing numerous visual perceptual skills as well as hand skills and executive functioning. You can play this with many different ages and cognitive levels. It's starts with a 4-piece Jr. version and advances to a 16-piece extreme version. You really get your moneys worth as there are MANY challenges to work through. The Jr. version has 60 challenges and the regular and extreme versions each hav ..read more

Dinosaurs Mystic Islands - Keep the plant-eaters separate from the meat-eaters Dinosaurs Mystic Islands, is a dinosaur themed, one-person logic puzzle from SmartGames. Using the six puzzle pieces, build islands in the plastic base by following the patterns in the challenge book. The one rule is to make sure that the herbivores (green dinosaurs) do not end up on the same islands as the carnivores (red dinosaurs). The base and pieces are all hard plastic and the dinosaurs are made from a softer plastic. The six pieces are all rectangles of the same size, just with different ..read more

Squint - Assemble the shapes to make a whole. Squint will require you to use visualization as well as your imagination to see the parts of the whole, and the whole from the parts. And sometimes, if you squint and the object becomes a little fuzzy, it may actually come into focus sharp enough for you to see it. That sounds like a puzzle, but it's really not. The game is designed so that you will need three people, but this can easily be played 1:1 in a therapy situation. The object of the game is to build an object so that someone else can gues ..read more