With Valentine’s Day, “Galentine’s Day,” and Saint Dwynwen’s day all around February most people think of “love” as a theme for this month (here are my other monthly themes). I wanted to use “self-care,” instead, because it’s the way we show love to ourselves and it enables us to show love to others! A couple …
For my self-care sensory bin I wanted to use the hot cocoa breaths exercise as inspiration. I had a heck of a time putting this one together. I’d planned to use chocolate-scented kinetic sand, but I couldn’t find any sold individually! So I took the chocolate-scented sand out of my sensory box for November. Then …
I love the Zones of Regulation. Through it, Michelle Garcia Winner and her colleagues incorporate all the things I’ve learned about sensory processing, emotion regulation, and self-care. I can’t recommend the Zones curriculum highly enough for all SLPs or, really, anyone working with children. I found when using the tools from this book I needed …
I recently ran into a problem: the toddlers I’m working with needed a toy that could help them learn to label emotions. Interestingly, our research is showing that it’s easier for children to label others’ emotions than it is for them to label their own so I start with kids labeling the emotions of others. …
For my “self-care” prizes I decided to use these emoji erasers, which I got a couple years back and found that each kid either loves or hates them. I also got these heart-shaped squeezers for my prize box. You can find the rest of my themed prizes here.
Here’s February’s self-care-themed virtual treatment room! Visit it to see the webcams, apps, videos, and websites I’m using this month. Here’s a link to my folder of themed virtual treatment rooms (so you can download and edit a room to make it your own). You can find my other themed virtual treatment rooms here.
My patients and I are loving this new sensory wall! It’s renter-friendly, too! I ordered these sensory circles, which stick to glass and plexiglass, but can be removed and replaced. I got a 2-foot-by-3-foot frame and glitter vinyl to put into it (the vinyl was really difficult to work with and I recommend glitter cardstock, …
When I write these posts I don’t like to say any of my lists are exhaustive. I often realize, “I use this material all the time, yet I haven’t written about it on my blog!” That’s why I like to write each list about my “favorite” things instead of the ones I use most often.
Before COVID-19 I kept a sensory tub. I would change the filling every month and my patients would use it to help their regulation as we worked. Now that I’m more concerned about the kids sharing germs (which was already a concern since some kids inevitably put parts of the sensory bin into their mouth …
As a part of Mental Wellness Month I wanted to share my favorite self-care ideas. “Self-care” is a hot topic these days, but I often find myself debating about what it really is. Sometimes I relate it to regulation so that I think of self-care as “doing things that keep me at my most regulated, …
