Sensory Integration Games

Children process, interpret and respond to sensory information daily. While sensory integration games are largely intended to benefit children with sensory processing disorders, all children can benefit from sensory-rich games. A sensory-rich environment provides fun learning opportunities for all children. To create successful sensory integration games, allow your child to choose from a variety of activity options.

Playdough and Silly Putty

• Most children love to play with playdough and silly putty. Doing so promotes creativity; strengthens hands, fingers and wrists; and helps develop normal tactile, or sense-of-touch, processing. Fine motor skills are improved, and organizational abilities are learned through this fun sensory integration game. If your child tends to eat the playdough or Silly Putty, make a homemade salt dough recipe.

Mummy

• Pretending that your child is a mummy is another sensory integration game. To play this game, all you need are elastic bandages. Wrap your child tightly like a mummy from his shoulders to his ankles. This can calm and regulate an oversensitive sense of touch.

Gentle Rough Housing

• Gentle rough housing is a no-cost and appropriate sensory integration game. This activity can include the child stretching like airplane on top of your feet, gentle wrestling, a horse ride on your back or a wheelbarrow walk. All of these games help your child strengthen muscles and encourage appropriate anticipatory and protective responses to sensory input. Rough housing helps your child develop coordinated movement, improve social skills and gain knowledge of how to make and keep friends.

Swing, Bat and Pitch

• Combining swinging with baseball --- known as swing, bat and pitch --- improves coordination, strengthens visual-motor skills, and enhances perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body, called proprioception. Have your child lie, stomach-down, on a swing with a large plastic bat in hand. In front of the swing, set a 5-gallon bucket topped with plastic water jugs---some full some empty---for him to swing at. Don't forget to yell home run when he gets a good hit.

Crash Pad

• If you're seeking a sensory integration game that works on multiple senses at once, crash pad may be the answer. Set an oversized bean-bag in a safe location that is free from potentially harmful surrounding objects. Allow your child to leap from a stool, chair or other object onto the bean-bag, landing in various positions. This game provides strong proprioceptive and tactile input, and increases his sense of equilibrium, or vestibular input.

Fishing

• Fishing can be a beneficial sensory game, with the benefit of improving hand-eye coordination, providing tactile input and increasing body awareness. Tie a sturdy string to a stick, broomstick or tree branch to create a fishing pole. Tie a magnet to the other end of the string. Have your child help you cut fish out of cardboard or cardstock and attach a large paper clip to one end. Then go fishing.

Pillow Sandwich

• Your child may like pretending he is a sandwich if he is tactile defensive (sensitive to touch sensations, or easily overwhelmed or fearful of normal daily activities). To play this game, have him lie between two pillows, pretending to be a sandwich, while you apply firm pressure to the top pillow. Make sure you ask him if the pressure is too hard or soft, because some children like very firm pressure, while others will become over-stimulated by too much pressure. Throw blankets in the sandwich as "condiments" to add a twist to this game.