Use Neon bouncy balls in your sensory room with a backlight, for lots of visual, tactile, bouncy fun & play.
MESMERIZING WATER PLAY
GLOW IN THE DARK WATER MADE SIMPLE – If you have a sensory room or similar with a good blacklight, you can create a water play experience with a difference by adding fluorescent paint to your water. A visually fabulous and engaging sensory activity for super special sensory learners of all ages.
SPRING APP COLLECTION
A wonderful collection of apps that can be used to complement Spring, Gardening & Minibeast topics. Great for play or learning in the classroom or at home for children & young adults with Autism, complex & other additional learning needs.
TOUCH THE LADYBIRD BY DAVID HERRERA SOLAS
This is a super simple app, touch the ladybird and it will fly to the other side. A good app for helping develop directed touch.
Available from the App Store
TOUCH AND BORN BY ATECH APPS
Tap the screen and lots of caterpillar-like creatures with appear and start to move.
Create a long creature by dragging your finger along the screen, shake the screen to change the background colour and feed the Caterpillar sweets & cakes to watch it grow.
The creature begins to move and touch the screen with lines and points in the sense Drawing.
Available on the App Store
SENSORY LIGHTBOX BY COGNABLE
Such a fantastic & well loved app by all the children & young people I support.
There are so many different themes to choose from, but the following are great for Spring themed topics. Touch the screen to generate:
Flowers
Bees
Rain
Umbrellas.
There are fabulous sounds to go with the themes and you can also change the background to alter the contrast to suit the visual needs of different learners. This app is also switch accessbile.
There is a sister app too called Sensory Sound Box, both available on the App & Google Play store.
PEPI TREE BY PEPI PLAY
This is such a fabulous & fun app. By touching the screen learners can explore the habitats of lots of different animals that live in trees.
The app focuses on a tree as an eco-system. You can learn about what the different animals look like, what they eat and how they get there food, and where they exactly live in the branches, on the leaves or underground.
My favourite is the caterpillar, the game player can have lots of fun moving their finger around a leaf, apple, pear and more to watch the creature eat them all up. A really super app if you reading the ‘Hungry Caterpillar’
This app is available form the App Store
INSECT PARADISE BY ATECH APPS
Touch & drag your finger along the screen to make insects appear and start moving around the screen.
Big insects like beetles are born by touching the screen
Smaller insects such as bees & ants are born when the player drags their finger along the screen
Create a visual reaction when you touch tap the bigger insects.
Tap the larvae to watch more appear.
This app is available on the App store & the Google Pay store
KAPU FOREST
I really love this fun & colourful app.
Discover lots of fantastic animals in the Kapu Forest. Fed the hungry fox, build a dam with the beaver and help all the busy bees find there nectar and so much more.
This app is available on the App store & the Google Play store.
BLOOM TUNES
Another engaging & amazing app from Kapu.
Kapu Bloom Tunes combines painting with making music
The game player can dig deep into the ground to decorate the seed of magic, mystical musical flower.
Painting will make the whole soil resonate with beautiful chords and joyful melodies, inspiring the little ones to further explore the world of music.
Pouring magic water over the seed will make it sprout as a happy little plant, which will in time bloom in to a colourful flower, full of life and music!
When tickled the plant will sing you an ever-changing melody!
•The plant knows how to sing familiar nursery rhymes as well as dozens of cheerful little compositions of its own!
By giving it a spin of its petals, the child can explore and experiment by speeding up, slowing down or playing in reverse these magical small melodies.
This app is available on the App store & Google Play store.
FUN CHIME
Tap the screen on this fabulous interactive landscape, filled with beautiful trees, flowers & hidden surprises, which generate lovely sounds & graphics.
Create a muscial flowers meadow
Conduct a magical musical firework display
Explore day & night scenes full of hidden treasures, such as a scary cave, rain cloud & rainbow.
This app is available on the app store.
SAGO MINI FOERST FLYER
Go on a fun forest adventure with Robin in an interactive world full of eyecatching animations, that will bring joy & smiles to the games player.
Start the journey a Robin’s treehouse, ring the doorbell to invite his feathered friend out to play. Discover the magical forest together as you soar through the sky, dance & make new friends.
This app is available from the App store & the google play store.
Look out for more app recommendations, tried & tested by very special game players with SEND on the Sensory Soup Facebook page & Instagram.
‘Hundreds of Bubbles’
If you have a sensory room & and a projector this lovely YouTube video would look fabulous projected onto the wall. Lots & lots of colourful floating bubbles :))).
Super Sensory Toys
I wanted to share some of the fabulous sensory toys I have discovered this school year which have been a massive hit with the children & young people I support with SEND in the sensory room.
WOODEN RAINBOW STACKER
This colourful wooden rainbow stacker has caught the eye of most of the learners I support with ASD.
It is a wonderfully therapeutic toy that has kept them engaged…separating the pieces then putting the arches back together so they all line up equally.
Some learners have re-built the rainbow up right or some flat to the floor, others have found a gap somewhere in the room to post the rainbow pieces through.
These wooden rainbow puzzles would be a very helpful toy to help interpret the structure & shape of a rainbow to a learner with a visual impairment.
A great toy also for working on fine motor skills, colour recognition, size & counting.
LUSTRUMLIGHT LIGHTSTAX
These light-up blocks are marvellous to use in a dark environment or sensory room if you have one as they light up—a fun alternative to a lego or plastic Duplo brick used in the classroom.
Not only do these bricks light up, but they also flash fast or slow as well as react to sound and light. They come on a base that a USB plug can recharge, so no need for batteries.
The bricks in the picture are of the starter set, but additional extension kits are available to buy with different brands.
An excellent toy for children & young people who have a visual impairment. Great for cognitive development, fine motor, construction and creative skills.
Available from Amazon
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A super toy for children with visual impairments, great for working on colour, construction, motor, creative skills & cognitive development.
GLOW IN THE DARK RACE TRACK & CARS
If you have a sensory room with fluorescent lighting, the track for these cars will glow brilliantly.
The cars are fascinating too as they have flashing lights., so make sure you have lots of batteries!.
This car & track set is brilliant for a child’s imagination as they can bend & build the car track in many different ways.
Clicking the track together is brilliant for developing fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. The visual stimulus of this car & track set makes it another excellent toy for children with visual impairments.
Sadly some of my cars were road-tested by my sensory room visitors off-road in materials, like rice & sand…if this happens don’t worry you can buy replacements from Amazon :)).
WOODEN ROTATING MAGIC LOLLIPOP
This wooden spin lollipop is just mesmerising
Twist it one way to make it swirl, the other way to make it burst.
This toy makes a great fidget spinner. It is very relaxing and very addictive.
There are lots of different magic lollipops on the market. This one cost £6 from Wish.
HANDHELD USB FAN
Not a toy, but this handheld fan has been another huge hit with the learners I support. They have enjoyed blowing a breeze over themselves & I have used it as a sensory stimulus in my ‘Spring Is Here’ communication through touch activity, which has generated some smiles.
It has different settings to create different breeze levels, and it charges via a USB plug, so no need to worry about replacing expensive batteries.
I picked this fan up from my local shop for just £5.
AMBER & ME – World Down Syndrome Day 2021
A moving documentary about Down Syndrome, childhood & friendship.
To watch this documentary click on the following link https://www.amberandmefilm.com/screenings
Light Up A Rainbow with Alexa
Pressing a Step By Step switch to turn a light-up rainbow on & off, a brilliant way to use smart technology with a learners who are non-verbal & have limited movement, giving them an opportunity to control their environment independently.
A fabulous visual stimulation & turn-taking activity too :)).
Multisensory Rainbow Bucket
Create a multisensory rainbow bucket to teach your special learners about colour & rainbows using their senses perfect for a Spring or weather theme.
Our multisensory rainbow bucket activity gives you loads of ideas of what you might like to include in your bucket to help your learner learn about the wonder of rainbows. Makaton signs & Widgit symbols are included with this activity, a great additional resource for teaching new signs whilst playing & exploring
Wonderbaby.org is a website that has been set up to support parents of young children with visual impairments and children with multiple disabilities. The following words are taken from an article on their site about how to teach a blind child about rainbows.
A multi-sensory approach can be the best way to bring an image (or classroom lesson) to life by combining some or all of the senses to build a comprehensive representation! Colours can be represented by a scent or taste: Strawberries for red or limes for green, for example. Ever think about “touching” colour? When you see a red ember in the fire, you think HOT! Temperature can represent colours just as well (but be careful!) where red means hot and blue is cold, or perhaps white is cold. But be creative and flexible with your translations. There are various examples of things that contradict each other, like fresh cold strawberries with white whipped cream, or the warm blue waters of a tropical beach.………read more at www.wonderbaby.org.
‘What A Wonderful World’ By Louis Armstong
What A Wonderful World’ is a beautiful song by Louis Armstrong.
We have created a sensory story from this song’s words, brilliant for a Spring or Summer theme or an activity anytime at home.
There is a brilliant video for the song available on YouTube, ‘What a Wonderful World’ by Loius Armstrong, and an illustrated book by Tim Hopgood.
Visit our website’s resource section to download FREE Makaton signs & Widgit symbols to support this activity.
Happy Senso Multisensory Gel
HAPPY SENSO is a gel with multi-sensory properties. It stimulates multiple senses all at once, and its intensity can be varied by applying it in several ways. You can hear, feel, smell and see it. There is also a cooling effect on the skin. An excellent product for sensory stimulation. It’s fun to use, makes eyes shine with enthusiasm and provides beautiful contact moments. HAPPY SENSO is of the highest quality and has been dermatologically tested. Highly appreciated by occupational therapists, physiotherapists, remedial therapists and speech therapists….www.happysenso.com
Google ‘Happy Senso Gel’ for UK stockists.