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What Are Preparatory Activities and Why Does Everyone Need to be Doing Them?
Preparatory activities are the “warm ups” you incorporate into a treatment session. These activities should stimulate different sensory systems, wake up different muscle groups, and help the child prepare for functional, occupation-based activities.
We dive into WHY we love preparatory activities and we give you our top 10 favorites that you need to include daily!
This isn’t just for therapists - parents and teachers can use these preparatory activities to help children prepare for daily activities at home and in the classroom!
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All Things Sensory Podcast Instagram
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Ep. 139: Easy Ways to Incorporate Speech into Play
Ep. 223: Implementing Sensory Strategies with Pre-Verbal Children
Build an Obstacle Course in 5 Easy Steps (YouTube)
5 Ways to Use a Sensory Bin (YouTube)
10 Visual Motor Activities (YouTube)
Astronaut Training - Vital Links
Benefits of the Brushing Protocol (Blog)
TalkTools - Horn (whistle) Kit
Check out our video about Motor Overflow
What Are Preparatory Activities and Why Does Everyone Need to be Doing Them
If you're an OT, OTA, parent, or a teacher, it's beneficial to integrate preparatory activities into your children/students' sensory diets as part of their playtime. We'll be discussing several excellent exercises that can help before mealtimes and dressing skills, something teachers could also use for pre-activities like handwriting tasks or math problems.
What Are Preparatory Activities?
Preparatory activities can be viewed as warmups before the occupational tasks during an OT session. Such exercises activate both body and mind to get ready for the upcoming activity to carry out occupation at its best level possible - in the case of kids, their main job is playing. By preparing them beforehand, we prepare our children so they can take part in playtime optimally!
We are excited to guide you through 10 preparatory activities with examples of when and how they should be used. These activities will help prepare your child for any challenge that comes their way!
1) Vestibular Input
If you're looking to provide vestibular input, swinging is the way to go! Rotary motion tends to be most effective for this purpose - just ensure it's not overly stimulating.
Vestibular input is ideal for children who seem in their own world, disconnected from the environment, or fatigued from a long day. However, just swinging without any kind of engagement isn't enough; you need more than that to make it an effective preparation activity. Moreover, under certain conditions, if they are over-excited, vestibular motion may help them feel calmed and regulated, but this should not be used as a preparation tactic.
A great preparatory activity in a swing could be incorporating a basketball hoop and a basketball. Every time the child swings close to the basketball hoop, they try to throw the basketball into the hoop. This way they're working on visual motor skills, projected action sequencing, and timing.
Prior to any strenuous activity, we strongly recommend doing a few vestibular exercises. This will help regulate arousal level and promote better sensory integration. After you've completed the swinging activities, feel free to get started with the heavy work. You can also complete this before a task requires focus and attention.
2) Obstacle Courses
Obstacle courses are a great preparatory activity. They can also be used as a functional task simultaneously. This includes motor planning, postural control, vestibular and proprioceptive, and visual and auditory. There’s also multi-sensory processing that engages and coordinates simultaneously. They include bilateral coordination, like crawling and jumping, and climbing. They also include visual tasks throwing and catching and matching.
Obstacle courses are so helpful to include before you're sitting down for a fine motor task, or before homework, or even before self-care tasks. If you're working on hair brushing or brushing the teeth or dressing skills in OT, completing an obstacle course beforehand is great. It's also a great way to build rapport.
3) Astronaut Training
This is a specific protocol from Vital Links and training is recommended. It works to improve the vestibular auditory visual triad. Make sure to visit their website! Astronaut training includes rotary vestibular input, which can be overstimulating. So it's definitely a great idea to try it on you, try it on yourself, try it on your co-workers, and your friends before you try it on your kids. This way, you understand and can have empathy if the child struggles with it. Ultimately, astronaut training is a great preparatory activity to complete before heavy work just like we talked about with swinging, but also a task that requires visual motor or visual perceptual coordination. So things like reading and writing, throwing and catching, self-care tasks, self-feeding.
4) Brushing Protocol
Similar to astronaut training, we highly recommend training in this protocol before providing it to clients. There are different names for this protocol - Deep Pressure Brushing Protocol, the Wilbarger brushing protocol, and the Deep Proprioceptive Touch protocol. It's a tool designed to help with tactile over-responsiveness or tactile sensitivity. It provides deep pressure and tactile input simultaneously. We've seen a lot of success using this protocol with kids who are over-responsive to sensory input and seekers because it provides so much sensory input.
5) Metronome Activity
We love metronome activities, probably just as much as we love obstacle courses. They are an incredible way to get multiple senses working at once. We like to call that multi-sensory processing and pretty much anytime we talk about multi-sensory processing, we’re talking about a metronome. This requires the child to listen to the beat of the metronome and simultaneously complete another task, usually in coordination with the beat. This can include clapping and patting patterns, stomping and marching patterns, you can throw and catch to the beats, or bounce a ball and catch to the beats reading a visual chart.
Metronome Activities are great for kids who are impulsive; an activity to complete before a school-based or homework task, or even a self-care task something that requires focus and attention. A metronome activity will help promote and facilitate organization, attention, processing speed, and all other higher-level cognitive skills.
6) Oral Motor Heavy Work
Oral motor heavy work is excellent for providing heavy work to our oral structures and calming proprioceptive input. Activities like blowing a cotton ball to a target, using a straw, or using your own breath. Follow a path made of painter's tape by blowing a cotton ball along the path! Bubble Mountain is a fantastic activity where you put some water in a bucket or a bowl with dish soap, grab a silly-shaped straw, and have your child blow with deep breaths to make a huge bubble mountain.
The Talk Tools whistle kit has different receptive different resistances of whistles and uses different mouth positions. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you don't have it already!
These oral motor activities are great to complete before self-care tasks, especially feeding or brushing the teeth. Even if you are going into an overstimulating situation or an activity that can be a little bit too much to process, these oral motor activities can be really regulating.
7) Hand Warm-Ups
Exercises to strengthen the hands and fingers are beneficial for everyone, whether they're at school, home, or the therapy clinic. Anything that increases muscle control is ideal. For optimal fine motor dexterity tasks, it’s important to also involve core and upper body activity as this will help create stability which promotes better fine motor control.
Start with a full body heavy work activity, something weight bearing on the hands, like animal walks, or ball walkouts, making sure that the child's hands are flat on the floor, fingers are open, and you have good alignment throughout the shoulders and the elbows and the wrists. And then you can work on focusing on the palmar arches and the fingers with crumpling paper. Try crumpling a piece of paper with just one hand, don’t use your other hand to help and don't use the table to help. This is actually really tricky, especially with your non-dominant hand. This is a great activity!
Another activity is sequential finger touching. When you do sequential finger touching, you want to make sure that you're touching the tip of your thumb to the tip of each finger. You're just gently tapping, not pushing hard. You also want to make sure that you're creating a circle with your fingers during the sequential finger touching. And that means that the thumb joints are flexed just slightly so that it creates a circle. And this is really going to focus on the Palmer arches.
Another activity is using playdough and theraputty. Squeezing it, rolling it, flattening it out by using a rolling pin. These activities are great to warm up all those hand muscles. You're going to want to complete these before handwriting tasks or other fine motor coordination tasks, like eating with a spoon and a fork, brushing your teeth, brushing your hair, or typing.
8) Sensory Bins
We love sensory bins! They're so fun and functional to warm up the tactile system. You can use dry tactile mediums like rice beans or Koren sand. Things like digging for letters or puzzle pieces or beads with eyes open eyes closed. You can use tactile mediums like shaving cream or Oobleck, which is cornstarch and water, or water beads. Scooping, pouring, drawing letters or drawing shapes are all great ideas!
If you have a goal to work on shapes or letters, work on those activities in a sensory bin! It builds the neural connection, makes it so much stronger, when there is a multi-sensory component.
9) Pretend Play
A child’s main occupation is play. So this is a great preparatory activity! Include pretend play as a fun way to engage the child in social activities. Imaginative play builds those visualization and praxis skills. Try having a pretend kitchen set up, and you can cook a meal! You can pretend to ride the school bus with some type of obstacle course. Use a swing, and you can pretend to be playing at the park!
Maybe have the child use stuffed animals and get them dressed and ready for the day. This is great to complete before those challenging self-care activities. If the child struggles to brush their teeth, do a pretend brushing teeth play activity with a stuffed animal or teeth drawn on a whiteboard. And they have to brush them clean. And then they go brush their own teeth as part of their session! Do pretend play in a functional real way, and it will help translate those skills but also makes it way more fun.
10) Emotional Awareness Activities
Identifying emotions, and practicing regulation skills in OT is a huge part of therapy. So as shown in Zones of Regulation, recognizing what a red zone is, a yellow zone and green zone, is so helpful. Build a stoplight so you can have the child identify what zone they’re in throughout the activities. You can then practice regulation or sensory-based strategies to help find that green zone.
Using a tool like a calm down bottle is another great option to help the child focus and practice that emotional regulation. And you can use that as kind of an extension or reinforcement after the session has ended. It’s just something that you can use when their emotions are getting high.
BORING, BUT NECESSARY LEGAL DISCLAIMERS
While we make every effort to share correct information, we are still learning. We will double check all of our facts but realize that medicine is a constantly changing science and art. One doctor / therapist may have a different way of doing things from another. We are simply presenting our views and opinions on how to address common sensory challenges, health related difficulties and what we have found to be beneficial that will be as evidenced based as possible. By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or your children. Consult your child’s pediatrician/ therapist for any medical issues that he or she may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Under no circumstances shall Rachel Harrington, Harkla, Jessica Hill, or any guests or contributors to the podcast, as well as any employees, associates, or affiliates of Harkla, be responsible for damages arising from use of the podcast.
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