Just like a parent can decide a child has a cold and needs Calpol, a sensory rich home environment can help support development. However just like a child may need a Dr, Dentist or other specialist if they have a more serious illness, what some people need is specialist intervention. Sensory Integration therapy requires years…
Category: Sensory Strategies
Back to School: help and ideas for all
Back to school is just around the corner. School can be tricky for young people with sensory integration challenges, and especially those first few weeks in a new schools, classrooms, with new teachers and sometimes new classmates. New uniforms and shoes can be challenging also. Practising these exercises at home over the next 2 weeks…
CPD on the Sofa: An Activities Guide for Enhancing & Practicing Executive Function Skills
Supporting development is everyone’s business. If you are a therapist practicing Ayres’ Sensory Integration, parent education and support between sessions with sensory rich activities to support development through ploy is likely to be a part of what you do. The resource includes downloadable printable activities guides for different ages, that will make great handouts for…
Occupational Therapy and Trauma 3: A Tool for considering the physical environment in children’s residential homes to address sensory processing issues in trauma-affected children
This article by Clinical Psychologists Christopher Robinson and Alicia Madeleine Brown in the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care includes a lovely environmental checklist (adapted from Simpson 2009) used in considering the physical environment in three children’s residential homes. Abstract: Sensory processing issues are generally considered to be clinically significant in children who have suffered…
RESOURCES FOR PRACTICE: USING THE THEORY OF AYRES’ SENSORY INTEGRATION TO INFORM CLINICAL PRACTICE WITH OLDER ADULTS – 1.
We need to consider the importance of maintaining tactile discrimination skills – adequate tactile perception is necessary for using tools in a skillful way for participation in lifelong hobbies like sewing, model making, cake icing and painting. Last night we were delighted to receive a great fb update from our friend and colleague Tina Champagne….
Sensory Ladders
The first Sensory Ladders were made in 2001 for adults with sensory integration difficulties receiving help with mental health difficulties in Cornwall. Influenced by the paediatric Alert Program, they offered therapists a way to combine Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and Ayres’ Sensory Integration, addressing the development of the person’s self-awareness in collaboration with ward staff on an…
Ayres’ Sensory Integration and the great outdoors
The “just right challenge: for this plucky young lady. She clearly likes the sensory input these activities are providing to her body and brain. These are exactly the outdoor sensory system challenging opportunities afforded by climbing trees and jumping streams that Jean Ayres’ wanted to recreate in her therapy spaces. For those of us lucky enough to…
Changing lives with trauma; Sensory Ladders, Sensory Strategies and Ayres’ Sensory Integration
Last week I found a copy of a therapy review that a young person wrote a few years ago. “My sensory me is about me – and only me. It’s not about anybody else. It helps me be me. I don’t worry about what other people think I should be. I am starting to like me…
About Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and Ayres Sensory Integration
This feature article was written by Claire Smith, one of the first UK OT’s to deliver Sensory Integration alongside Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT). I am delighted to introduce Claire to you, as she was one of the first people I ever lectured about how to apply Sensory Integration’s in Mental Health. That was way back…
Developing self-regulation is important
Many children may have difficulties with self-regulation, especially those who have had tricky starts; including from traumatic illness, accident, trauma or neglect. Increasingly OT’s are using Ayres’ Sensory Integration in combination with CBT( Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), adapted DBT (Dialectical Behavioural Therapy) and Attachment based approaches in CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental health Services) and other paediatric roles to assess…
Ayres’ Sensory Integration Evidence 