Feed the Need: Heavy work tips for the early childhood classroom
February 2, 2021
Are you wondering how to best support those “wiggly” children in your classroom? Are you struggling to get children to attend to you?
Maybe Heavy Work (activities providing proprioceptive input) can help.
Occupational Therapist, Leslie Bodkin shared these great sensory diet ideas for the early childhood classroom. There are so many options here for implementing Heavy work into the classroom. Heavy work is anything that involves pushing, pulling, squeezing, or pressure. These opportunities can provide calming input. which in turn can help children settle and attend.
You can download the infographic for implementing heavy work ideas here
What is a SENSORY DIET and how can I incorporate such a diet into my classroom?
Think of a sensory diet much like you would think of a nutritional diet. For most of us, a nutritional diet might be made up of three meals a day and one or two snacks. Or maybe it is made up of six small meals per day. A nutritional diet also needs to have a variety of types of food in it; if you are eating only one food (say grapefruit), you are receiving some very good nutrition but not a range and grapefruit alone will not sufficiently meet all of your dietary needs.
You also can’t do the diet successfully in quick portions. For instance, you can’t eat all the food for your diet in one half hour on Monday morning and then not have any food again until Wednesday afternoon. It’s not an effective way to diet!
Just like we all need nutrition, children all need sensory input, and a steady diet of it. A range of sensory-based activities helps expand the learning of children, increase their abilities, and help them feel calm, alert and organized throughout their day. There are a wide range of activities provided here to help you think of some ways to provide a sensory-rich classroom space. The more we can meet the sensory needs of children in our care, the more we promote their overall regulation, learning, and ability to interact and form relationships with the people in their world.
