How to make plyadough at home
Find Teacher Cathy reading new stories in Story Time section
Update 24/03/2020
We are successfully up and running with Seesaw. So far we have had two new activities assigned by Teacher Niamh.
Yesterday with the help of our parents we made a sensory box, exploring rough and soft objects. We showed our likes and dislikes for the different textures.
Today we have been given pre-writing exercises and sensory movement break ideas. We have also been given a recipe for microwave puffy paint!! Teacher Niamh might try it at home and make a video for us!!
Subject: Snowdrop Activities 19_3_2020
Activities 19/03/20
Start the morning activities off with some meditation and mindfulness, here’s a nice video with a calming script and relaxing pictures and sounds.
If you are having some floortime together work on building up a treasure box of objects for your child to explore, today let’s put scarves in the treasure box. Scarves are a simple resource you have in your house that have lots of different textures. Help your child explore the textures and see if they have a preference for a particular texture.
We can also use the scarves to work on visual tracking. Visual tracking is very important to develop for choice making and communication. Hold the scarf in front of your child and move it slowly to develop eye tracking skills.
TacPac is another activity you’ll often hear me mention in the school news. Here is a video of how tacpac works. If your child shows a preference for a sensory experience wait and ask them if they want more. Try reinforce their method of communication e.g. they may vocalise, shake their head, tap their desk or clap their hands for more.
For music you can start with simple drumming activities, you can use a pot or pan and a spoon! It’ll be loud but fun!! We do drumming activities in class and it helps the children to learn imitation skills, rhythm, develops physical motor skills and also develops joint attention.
- Bang the drum twice and call the child’s name
- Sing the Grand Old Duke of York and make the beat with the drum
- Sing if you’re happy and you know it
- Imitate the drumming patterns of the child
- Take turns and build up turn taking skills.
- Bang the drum loud, quietly, fast and slow
I have attached four pictures for you to make a choice board at home. In school we print out the pictures on a piece of card and we encourage the children to point to the pictures to make a choice. Some children are not pointing but are turning their head towards the picture to make a choice. These are the choices we have in class and I can make more pictures for you if have a particular toy or activity at home that you use. These pictures are from the PECS programme so they are standardised and used by Speech and Language Therapists.
Finally finish off your activities with some messy play, today use shaving foam. If you’re feeling very adventurous put some paint or glitter in the shaving foam!!! I’ll have a new messy play idea for you each day.
Here are the benefits of Messy Play
- Fine Motor Skills
- Gross motor skills
- Muscle strengthening
- Hand eye co-ordination
- Body control and balance
- Spatial awareness
If you have an ipad and want an app a day, I can also put that in.
Hope some of this helps
Teacher Niamh
March News
Snowdrop Class were filming today! I believe it had something to do with the story of The Little Red Hen and rapping may be involved. Can’t wait for Thursday’s World Book Week showcase!
January News
This month in Snowdrop we have been very busy. We have two sensory stories this month for our themed activities. We worked on the Three Little Pigs and Jack and the Beanstalk. For art with the Three Little Pigs we dipped the pig’s feet into the paint and off they went trotting along the page! We also used straw, sticks and bricks and dipped them in paint to make cool prints. For Jack and the Beanstalk we made a really cool playlist on Spotify and our LIT student Grainne played the music as Teacher was reading the story. There was great excitement and anticipation during the story. The music made it really exciting. We have had great fun this month bowling and doing parachute games. Our big news is that we went swimming as a class for the first time and everyone was so brave in the water. Another busy month in Snowdrop.
General
There are six children in Snowdrop class, five boys and one girl. We are the second youngest class in school and we love to play with our friends in the classes at the junior end of the school.
Our day in school is always very busy, we usually start the day with floortime or relaxation in the sensory room to get ready for our classroom activities. We enjoy circle time every day where we learn our Lámh songs, letter of the week, colour of the week and lots of other activities. Our favourite subjects in Snowdrop are visual arts, drama and music.