Physical Activities & Sensory Activities

Animal Walks. Have kids walk like a frog, crab, bear, snake, dog across the house. This type of movement is really important for young kids. It helps with motor planning, balance, strength, & cross body coordination.

Big Box Fun. Start saving all the big boxes from your hoarding Amazon orders. They will come in handy when it's time to build a box fort, box car, box airplane, robot costume, masks, series of ramps, etc.

Blowing through a Straw - Use a straw & a ping pong ball, or anything that floats in a shallow container, to try to move the object across a set space by blowing through straw. Good for coordination, visual tracking, & calming.

Dance Party Just throw on some music. If you want a little extra, add musical instruments, bubbles, fun lights, costumes.

Exploring Food Textures Provide foods with a variety of textures, such as dry/crunchy crackers, wet/crunchy carrots, jell-o, tapioca pudding, something really chewy (like gummi bears or squid), papery dried seaweed, etc.

Giant Homemade Bubbles

• 6 cups water
• 1/2 cup blue Dawn liquid dish detergent
• 1/2 cup cornstarch
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1 Tbsp liquid glycerin

1. Dissolve the cornstarch in water, stirring well.
2. Gently stir in remaining ingredients. Avoid creating a lot of froth.
3. Allow mixture to sit for at least an hour before playing with it.
4. Stir gently when you see ingredients settling on the bottom of your container.
5. As you play with the solution, it will become silkier and work better (ie. bubbles will be bigger). Some particles will keep settling out, this is fine. Just give it a stir every so often, but avoid creating froth.

Overcast/humid conditions are best. Wind, dry air and sunlight will wick moisture out of the bubbles and they'll pop before they form.

To make a Bubble Wand:

• 2 drinking straws
• Length of yarn 6-8X longer than the length of 1 straw
• Thread yarn* through straws**, tie knot

* Make yarn shorter if little ones are using it

** Use straws as the handles. We found bubbles formed really well if you hold just one straw, and let the other one dangle as a weight at the bottom

Go Fly a Kite on a Windy Day Bring wide strips of paper, write wishes on them, wrap them conically on the kite string and tape the paper together in the cone loosely on the string. Angle the string with the wind to send your wishes shooting up the kite string into the sky.

Hold an Egg Hunt  If you don't want to fill with edible treats, they can be filled with notes, little prizes, stickers. At 5, I did an egg hunt with Scrabble tiles in the eggs, then challenged my son to make as many words as he could with the tiles inside for a big prize (a small Lego set).

Ice Excavation Freeze bugs/mini animals/dinos in muffin tins. Dump into the bath, or a bin, give the kid a wooden mallet and let them smash out the prizes. I found little critters at the dollar store, and did this outside on hot days

Jello Tub Make a box or two of jello. Dump in a bathtub with toys/utensils/scoops, and let baby play with all the slippery squishy fun. I've done Dino themed with yellow jello, plastic dinosaurs, any scoops, or under the sea with sea critters and blue and green jello. Dissolves down the drain with hot water for easy cleanup.

Marsden Ball Vision Tracking Exercises 
Get 2 racket balls. Drill all the way through them. String rope through & secure with knots. Hang from hooks/tree branches so the two ends dangle far from each other.

Challenge kids to hit the ball several times with certain parts of their bodies: each finger, karate chop/side of hand, elbow, hip, knee, foot. They must alternate which side of their body hits each time.

Builds eye tracking/binocular vision skills, body awareness, crossing the mid-line, visual processing speed, body planning/coordination, & teaches control of force (because the other end is counter-weighted, if you hit too hard, the ball will change height).

Mini Indoor Digging Pit Dump any small material (oats, rice, lentils) into a shallow box or tray. Add scoops, cars, little construction vehicles.

Oobleck - mix a bunch of cornstarch with a little water until it forms an oobleck. Add food coloring if you want, put in a bowl or tupperware, young kids can play in the bath. Note how the speed and force that you use on the oobleck changes its properties. Strike it, and it acts as a solid. Move your hand slowly through it and it acts as a liquid. The more force you use, the more resistance you get. Hose off when done, it'll dissolve and clean right up.

Scavenger Hunt - you can tailor this to the age of the kids. Find something blue, find something older than... grandma, find something with the number 9 printed on it, a book with a picture of a zebra, etc etc etc. If they're old enough, just give them a loooong list. If they're young, keep it to 5-10 items.

Sensory Bottles Oldie but goodie for very young kids My kids' favorite were the wave bottle, magnetic bottle, and I Spy bottles. We still use the glitter bottle for when they're upset, it's a great visualization for returning to calm from chaos. Some great ones:

• Glitter Bottle. Use bright glitter or fun confetti and water or water with a bit of corn syrup.
• Shaker Bottles - fill bottles with random detritus. Rocks, beads, beans, etc.
• Magnetic Bottle - fill with steel-rimmed bingo chits, coiled pieces of pipe cleaners, and baby oil (so nothing rusts). Use hot glue or epoxy to seal shut. Give the kids a big magnet and let them explore all the magnetic things in the bottle.
• Wave Bottle (water, oil, food coloring). the food coloring colors the water, which separates from the oil. Move the bottle slowly sideways to get the wave going. The kid will shake it at some point, but it'll separate again eventually.
• Zero-Gravity Bottle. Fill the bottle full of something fairly uniform - I used a pile of buttons that I collected as a child for reasons I no longer know. Then fill with a blend of water and corn syrup until the density makes the items move slowly.

Tour of the Spice Cabinet Let kids smell some of the various herbs & spices in your pantry. Let them pick one to go into a relatively bland side dish (like rice).