These sensory integration activities are fun and can be very beneficial to your child’s overall wellbeing.

Children with sensory integration (SI) issues have difficulty processing everyday sensations. They also exhibit unusual behaviors such as avoiding or seeking out touch, movement, sounds, and sights.

Try some of these sensory integration activities at home:

• Dry swimming
  Use an imaginary pool to swim in. Use different floor textures to swim on, like carpet squares, tiles, wooden floors and if your child can tolerate it, on the grass. After “swimming use a towel to dry your child, using deep ruubing strokes, up and down. As you rub each body part, name them and have your child repeat them after you.

• Skate board
  Children can lie on the skateboard and propel themselves forward using their hands.Let them follow you on a trail through different textures around the house or outside. You can take a piece of rope, and let your child pull himself towards you while lying on his stomache on a skate board. Using a rope pull your child on a skateboard, going at different speeds.

• Rolling games
  Move your childs matress so that one end is on the floor and the other side is resting on the bed.Let your child roll from the top of the matress to the bottom, landing on pillows, carpet squares or different textured fabric, like velvet or corduroy.

• Spinning Activities
  Spin your child on a swing. Using a sheet, pull and spin your child along a tiled floor, going at different speeds.

• Heavy load activities
  With a loaded backpack, take your child for a walk. Go up stairs, walk uphill and downhill, over gravel, and grass etc. Build an indoor obstacle course using chairs, stool, pillows and blankets to create tunnels. Put weights in the pockets of pants and shirts and let then go through the course.

• Touch and feel activities
  Cut a hole in the top of the shoe box and place toys and fabrics with different shapes and textures into the box, let your child put their hand into the box and feel the different shapes. You can also let your child guess what the shapes and textures are.

• Painting
  Using different size and textured paint brushes, pretend to paint different part of the childs body. As you do this name the body parts. You can paint brushes, pastry brushes, bath and cleaning brushes, depending on how sensitive your child is and how much pressure he can take. Paint pretend freckles, a moustache or glasses on their face.

• Pushing objects
  Use a broom to push objects of various sizes and shapes through the house, over different textures, such as tiles and carpets.

• Paper pool
  Have your child ball up pieces of paper and throw them into a blow up pool. Once the pool is full have your child climb in and swim amongst the papers, climb over them and throw them in the air. Finally they can crush the paper pool until all the balls are flat.

• Simon says
  Play Simon says, using various different ways. Have your child jump up every time you call his name, do actions that are opposite (When you say up, they must go down, when you say left, they must go right.)

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Fine Motor Activities/ Gross Motor Activities/ Speech Activities