Oh. My. Goodness. January is long. That’s a fact and we are all suffering (that is also a fact).

I thought I would record some of the sensory activities I have been doing in January with the amazing children I support.

I love a garden and I love being outside in the garden. BUT. I hate gardening. I’m not interested in it and I have no skills either - so a bad situation all round really. However, I recently ‘did some horticulture’ (listen to me!! ha ha ha) and supported two children to grow cress. We explored the pots and kitchen roll. We explored the water and added it to the kitchen roll. Just a heads up; the seeds are small and travel far…….but some of them made it into the pots and then we abdanoned the pots on the side for a week…….ta dar! We grew cress. I was so happy. The children less so. I did have visions of making egg and cress for lunch but if you look at the cress you’ll see that was not an option. Thankfully supermarkets grow cress perfectly.

I occasionally enjoy a hot chocolate - perhaps once a year, so the gift of 6 delicious smelling hot chocolate tubs was going to take a lifetime to get through. As the hot chocolate was a posh one - you know - the smell was amazing. With this in mind I used the powder as the base for a sensory tray and added different textures to contrast the powder. This went down a treat and, luckily, it was easy to hoover up when it ended up on the floor! Every cloud……

I love washable (has to be washable) paint. Some of the families I support are very hesitant when I arrive at their homes brandishing paint, but others are a little braver. I always use covers and always clean up afterwards to ease any stress of paint getting on the carpets…..and if wiped up quickly you’d never even know it had been there. And that’s what I’m sticking to. We recently used paint to explore with our hands and then pushed cardboard hearts into the pattern to make a bunting. I am one of those people that is not interested in a perfect end result. I want to know what the child has explored; what senses were used to create the paint patterns and then I want ti capture these beautiful creations (this time on a heart). I do not want to see something that is clearly heavily lead by adult intervention. I want to see what the child has created. That is where the beauty can be found.

That’s enough from me for now - I’m off to run a Makaton taster session for parents now. But I’ll be back with more information about that soon!

Also - just for information: I support a variety of different children and in a variety of different settings but I do not have photo permission for all, hence why the faces of the children you do are are often the same ones. Just in case you were wondering…..