Creating “Calming Sensory Spaces” in the Classroom

  A recording of myself presenting on the topic, “Creating ‘Calming Sensory Spaces’ in the Classroom”. I presented this first to teachers at the school where I work, and then made minor adjustments and recorded it to hopefully encompass a broader audience. You may share it with teachers, school administrators, anyone you think it might … Read more

Stars and Rainbows

(From the archives of my own personal FB page, a story from when I was an early therapist. I would do some things differently now, but I still appreciated the story.) *** I have a kid who I see every week at the same time. He’s usually working on the same in-class spelling worksheet, and … Read more

Painting With The Ballooniverse

I’m a part of a group devoted to process art ideas for classrooms, daycares, homes, etc, called Process Art by Maryann Kohl. In that group, I saw a fantastic idea of dipping balloons in paint and then stamping it on a backdrop to make circular, marbled “planets”. Coincidentally, I have had a giant pile of … Read more

An In-Tents Crawling Game

I have this great set of tents connected by a crawl-through tunnel, and the children who come to my therapy gym already love crawling through it. To add a bit of a game element to it, and also with a specific child in mind who loves numbers, I put a foam numbers puzzle in one … Read more

Recycling Dried Markers

If you haven’t picked up on it by now, I really love it when activities can span across multiple weeks and have multiple steps and goals that shift and change each week. I feel like it helps kids recall their prior OT sessions as one overarching goal-oriented thing instead of only a handful of little disparate … Read more

Glow Stick Party

In January, in my therapy gym, we decided to have a glow stick party. Technically there was no “reason” for this other than that it was fun and changed up the pace a little bit, but there is also clinically an argument to be made for lots of things that the kids experienced via the … Read more

Occupationally Meaningful

When I get a kid on my caseload who has been forced, from too early, to trace and write — for whom it is HARD to trace and write, who quickly learns to HATE tracing and writing and learns that they are BAD AT tracing and writing — It snowballs from there. Sometimes compounded by … Read more