Flora, like many children with ASC, has difficulty sustaining attention for long periods of time and following long and complex instructions. As a result, they are not motivated to actively participate in educational activities and find it difficult to gain and maintain new knowledge.
In order to attract Flora's interest to participate in the educational activity and to consolidate the new knowledge it is important to organize sensory activities. In other words, it is important to organize activities that allow Flora to learn using more than one sense.
Sensory Activities need to:
Be accessible to everyone
To encourage active participation
To make connections between new and previous knowledge
To be engaging and fun.
Every student has different needs and learns in different ways.
By combining sound, sight, touch, movement and even taste, the activity is accessible and understandable to all students.
It also gives each student the opportunity, through the sense/senses that best suits them, to actively participate in the learning process, to connect new knowledge with their existing experiences and to have fun.
This week we chose to plan an activity to learn about the weather. In order to help Flora to learn about the different weather conditions, we chose different items that can be experienced with more than one sense.
More specifically to learn about the sun, rain, snow and wind we chose to use sunglasses, water spray, shaving foam and paper ‘'fans'. In this way, Flora will be able to connect the word concept (how it sounds) , with sight (what it looks like), touch (what it feels like), movement (how the body participates). More information can be found here.
We incorporated this activity into the Morning Circle so that gradually Flora can learn to say what the weather is like every day. More information about the Morning Circle can be found here.
We will share more tips and activities in the future, so keep visiting us.
We are looking forward to hearing your views and experiences. You can email us at florastophasma@gmail.com.