Bringing Lessons To Life
By: Katrina Karpeichik, MS, OTR/L and Kristyn Sequeira, MS, CCC-SLP
Have you ever wondered what skills your child is working on during storytime? Reading is one of the best ways to target a variety of skills, all while having so much fun! As a Speech Language Pathologist and an Occupational Therapist at The Wolf School, we work together to bring the Immersion Model© to life. Personally, we love opportunities to collaborate in the classroom to help bring books to life and make them even more engaging, meaningful, and fun for our students.
Through role play, sensory play, and creating crafts, we can elevate reading and learning in a playful way while also developing a variety of skills. Some of these skills include fine motor, sequencing, social skills, sentence production, sensory development (i.e, exploration, desensitization, tactile exploration), play skills, emotional regulation, creativity, and problem solving. But the fun doesn’t only have to happen at school. Using a simple variety of materials you may already have lying around your house, you can create sensory bins and put together crafts to elevate stories with your child at home! Read on to learn how.
We chose three different books and designed activities that can be replicated at home to make these books come to life. There are so many different activities that can be done to provide your child with a sensory-rich experience based on a book.
The Great Eggscape
Our first example comes from a recent book that was targeted during our social-emotional learning block. We took the book, The Great Eggscape, and brought it to life with our students.
- Areas Targeted: Social skills, sequencing, comprehension, fine motor skills, matching, tactile exploration
- Sensory Play: You can fill a plastic container with dried rice, beans, or pasta. Separate plastic eggs so your child has to dig through the sensory bin to find the matching colors or design and put them together. Once they put them together, they can put them into an egg carton. You could also hide the eggs around your home for your child to find & bring back to the container, just like in the story!
- Craft: Create your own egg from the story! Draw or print an egg outline on a piece of paper. Before adding your water colors or paint of choice, try to add designs with a white crayon. When you paint over the white crayon, it will reveal the designs you drew! Cut it out and add some eyes, a mouth, arms, and legs to match the characters in the story! You now have your own character…just make sure they don’t eggscape!
The Very Hungry Caterpillar:
- Areas Targeted: sequencing, comprehension, learning through play
- Sensory Play: In a large Ziploc bag, add rice, food coloring, and a little bit of vinegar. Seal the bag and shake it around to dye your rice green and red to match the colors of the caterpillar. Once the rice is dried, add the rice to a bin and have your child explore around the bin with their hands, a spoon, or a small shovel. They can sort the colors into different containers to make a caterpillar or just play with the bin as they listen to the story.
- Craft: Cut up an apple and put it in the shape of a caterpillar on a plate to match the one in the story! Cut up a strawberry for his face and use other foods to add in the details. This is a great way to enjoy a tasty and healthy snack or expose your child to new foods through a playful experience. Even if they do not eat the snack, it is still a great way to expose them so they can play, touch, smell, and maybe even taste the fruit. Another idea is to paint an old egg carton, add some googly eyes and pipe cleaner antenna to make your own very hungry caterpillar!
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
- Areas Targeted: sequencing, comprehension, sentence expansion, fine motor skills, executive function
- Sensory Play: Put a bag of dried beans or rice into a bin for your sensory bin filler. You can print out the items in the story or use play food/items if you have them at home. Have your child grab the items as they appear throughout the story so they can sequence along with the book.
- Crafts: Baking cookies is a sensory-rich way to target executive function and fine motor skills, to correspond with the book. You can also decorate a plate with puffy paint to look like a chocolate chip cookie! To make puffy paint, mix together white glue, shaving cream, and a little bit of brown paint. Use a brush, fork, or your hands to paint the plate then cut out some brown circles to add on the chocolate chips!
As a parent of a Complex Learner, you already know how important reading with your child is but bringing the stories to life is just as critical as it helps with comprehension and developing a variety of skills. So, next time it’s story time – be sure to add in some room for fun!
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