Group Activities for Sensory Integration
Participants appropriate for a sensory integration group include those who display difficulty with:
- Academic skills
- Attention
- Auditory discrimination
- Balance
- Bilateral coordination
- Body awareness
- Emotional security
- Eye-foot/hand coordination
- Fine/gross motor skills
- Flexibility
- Force or grading of movement
- Gravitational security
- Hand preference
- Healthy relationships with others
- Kinesthesia
- Muscle tone
- Postural stability
- Praxis including motor planning
- Self-comforting
- Self-esteem
- Self-protection
- Self-regulation
- Social skills/pragmatics
- Speech and language skills
- Tactile discrimination
- Visualization
- Visual discrimination
Contraindications for Group Treatment for Sensory Integration
- Behavior that precludes effective interaction within a group setting
Group Activities for Sensory Integration
- Obstacle course
- Making sand castles, mud pies
- Rolling in the grass
- Playing props with various types of fabric or materials
- Trampoline
- Follow the leader (e.g., walking on pillows/non-compliant surface, crawling inside barrel or tube, balance beam, monkey bars)
- Gentle rough-housing
- Looby-loo/ring-around-the-Rosie
- Jump rope
- Rope climbing/tug-o-war
- Kick ball, soccer, or other impact games
- Strike a pose to music for proprioceptive training
- Playground equipment (e.g., monkey bars, climbing through tubes, swing, slide, merry-go-round, teeter totter)
- Floor or wall “Twister”
- Bowling/mini golf/croquet
- Jai Alai
- Scavenger hunt
- Flashlight tag
- Balloon volleyball
- Games with ball play for hand-eye coordination
- Video Obstacle Course
- Band with musical instruments
- Rhythmical tapping/workout activities to music or a metronome
- Sounds/sound games (e.g., Farmer in the Dell)
- Whistling
- Musical chairs or other music-oriented games
- Rhyming games
- Olfactory craft projects (e.g., creating potpourri sachet)
- Coordinating activities with eating (e.g., playing with round balls and then eating round foods, listening to snapping, percussion-type sounds and then eating crunchy foods)
- Planting and eating from your own garden
- Blowing light-weight items (e.g., cotton balls) in a determined path or direction; blowing bubbles, pinwheel, balloons, bubble gum
- Mirror activities (e.g., kissing the mirror, making faces in the mirror, putting on make-up
- Proprioceptive games (e.g., Simon Says, Monkey See Monkey Do, Mirror-Mirror, Mother May I, Red Light Green Light, Paddy Cake, Miss Mary Mack)
- Fine motor activities (e.g., playing dress up with various pieces of clothing, play dough, assorted building blocks/sets, Lincoln logs, marbles)
- Squeezing squirt bottles for arts or blowing items in a race
Courtesy of Care2Learn's Clinical Care for Therapy Newsletter