February Interventions Part 1

Ah, February… The month of LOVE! *insert eye roll*

Hey, it’s fun for the kids. That’s all that matters. Trust me, my daughter has gone to daycare in a festive heart, tutu outfit all week. I’m into it.

For each month, I try to pick a theme. For February, I am going to be doing two themes. The first half of the month is focused around Valentine’s Day…then the second half will be focus on kindness. This Part One will be my therapy session layout for the Valentine’s theme.

So to begin…

I buy two of these books off Amazon at these books at the end of January.

They are $7.99 right now and you might be thinking…Why two? Well I buy two so I can destory one. Haha just kidding. I buy two so one can be used to cut apart and make little adapted stickers and then the other can be laminated and bound. I will explain in another post about how I make this adapted book.

Once I have those books made, I bring them to each of my sessions. I also organize and collect materials for my theme craft.

For each theme, I have an adapted book, a sensory activity, a craft and a fine motor game. So for February Part One, my adapted book is the Roses are Pink book, my sensory activity was picking foam hearts out of shaving cream, my craft is my heart man pictured above and my fine motor game is stringing small beads onto pipe cleaners to make heart bracelets.

My sessions consist of 5-8 minutes of reading the adapted book and having my children use their pincer grasp to take the Velcro stickers off and then put them back into the book as I read it to them. Then we will take 5 minutes to string the beads onto the pipe cleaners. I try to only do 5 minutes of this activity because I can make it a game to see how many they can get onto the pipe cleaner. Then their hands are warmed up. Then I spend 15 minutes putting together the craft. Most of the time, everything is already prepped and ready so 15 minutes is enough time. I do have some children who take WAY longer and this theme can be separated into two sessions. And then for the rest of the session, we play in the sensory tub. This theme was shaving cream and foam hearts.

My craft consists of construction paper in red, purple and pink, scissors, glue, pipe cleaners, googly eyes and tape. I included loop scissors because I have some children who are unable to use regular scissors. I prepped the hearts, the mouth and the eyes, by drawing bold guidelines for the child to cut on. They were able to choose their googly eyes and pipe cleaners for the arms and legs.

I have the child cut the construction paper on the guidelines. I help them cut the smaller eyes and mouth if they are having trouble. I then have them choose their pipe cleaners and googly eyes. They then glue the paper and googly eyes and then flip the paper and tape the pipe cleaners to the back. When I supply the tape, I put it on the table and ask them to use their pincers (pincer grasp) to pull the tape up. Then I have them make the arms and legs ‘swiggly’!

This activity will assess their scissor skills for curved lines, ability to make independent decisions, fine motor for tape and manipulating pipe cleaners and hand control for gluing.

I really hope all this made sense. I didn’t promise I was good at blogging, but I did promise I would share my ideas!