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Homemade Therapeutic Games for a Child

Play therapy is integral to developing your child's intellectual, emotional and social capabilities. While simultaneously providing therapeutic treatment for your child's disabilities and learning disorders, integrating enjoyable play activities is an excellent way to build lifelong skills. Create easy and enjoyable therapeutic games at home, and watch your child have fun, even as he unconsciously gains important life skills.

  1. Role Play

    • Children suffering from autism and attention deficit disorders have difficulty developing and maintaining positive social relationships. Between 4 and 6 years old, children usually find stuffed toys attractive. Use stuffed animals and dolls around the house, to help your child to safely explore and assimilate new experiences. Begin a 10-minute role-play session, by playacting the start of a story line, on the stuffed dog's imaginary day in the garden, for instance. Prompt the child to follow up, guide and redirect him to complete the story. Role play games are therapeutic and enhance social skills. They help children use cognitive processes to understand social cues, such as waiting, taking turns and winning or losing appropriately.

    Play Dough Activities

    • Some children are sensitive and fearful of touch sensations. Such sensory disorders, also known as "tactile defensiveness," can inhibit a child's interactions, which are critical to his learning and development. Help your child to overcome tactile defensiveness by using play dough. Prepare play dough at home using various cooking ingredients. Create edible and tasty play dough by mixing and kneading peanut butter, icing sugar, powdered milk and honey. Divide the dough into several portions and make your child mold and shape it on waxed paper. The child can eat the dough once the task is accomplished.

    Art and Craft Projects

    • Children who suffer from mental trauma are often unable to come to terms with the root cause of their suffering. Art and craft activities provide an outlet for children to express pent-up emotions and overcome unresolved issues. Reuse items to create interesting art and craft games such as a Zen garden. Fill a rectangular chocolate box halfway with sand. Add in a few rounded pebbles, and give your child a plastic fork to create designs in the sand. Allow him to enhance the garden by adding items such as animal, bird or plant toys. Art therapy will help the child improve his imaginative and abstract processing capabilities.

    Heavy Work Activities

    • Children with sensory processing disorders must be involved in activities that help their bodies to assimilate and process movement and feeling, to calm them. Heavy work activities provide the necessary stimulus to the muscles and joints; improves attention span and decreases the child's defensiveness. Create a homemade trampoline crash pit by allowing your child to jump and bounce on an old mattress or bean bag. Enhance the fun of this activity by asking the child to simultaneously perform other activities like clapping and singing while jumping.

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