Sensory diet

[sweetteamum]

I'm just hearing about a sensory diet and am really interested in doing this with my dc.

Is there any do's & don'ts or websites that have worked for you.

Does it take long each night or does it even have to be done everyday?

As you can tell I'm a real beginner :)

"The out of sync child" and "The out of sync child has fun" are really good. TOOSC explains sensory issues and will give you a steer as which which senses your DC is having problems with. And TOOSCHF will give practical suggestions for sensory activities. The idea of a sensory diet is that you incorporate sensory activities into your daily life, so yes, all through the day every day.

Has your DC had an OT assessment?

Thank you jack. Ds is waiting to be assessed currently. I'm sure they'll keep us waiting months so I wanted something to start us off.

I'll have a look at those on kindle shortly and hopefully get a good idea.

That's good. The OT assessment will give you a full report on exactly which areas your DC has problems with. But pending that, you can give yourself a pretty good idea by going through the explanations and checklists in TOOSC. The activity suggestions in TOOSCHF are categorised by the senses and by the type of difficulty e.g. hyper- or hypo-sensitivity, so you can match the activity to the difficulty.

The activities are largely things you can do at home with stuff you happen to have lying around (e.g. an exercise ball, the cushions from your sofa), or involving no equipment at all (although there are lots of specialist toys and pieces of sensory equipment you can buy, which you might want to look into - e.g. wobble cushions, weighted blankets, fiddle toys).

(I mean good that you are on the list to be assessed, not that you are having to wait ages, obviously!)

Lol thanks jack

We've actually got a wobble cushion, gym balls, weighted blanket and other sensory bits.

I just wanted to know about the diet and what activities I could do and you've been really helpful.

Also, as I've seen Polter helpfully explain on another thread recently, the idea is to embed as many sensory things as you can into your normal life, rather than restructuring your whole life around the sensory diet. So, for eg, DS always plays on his Wii as soon as he gets up in the morning and as soon as he comes in from school, and his OT suggested that he should continue to do that but sit on an exercise ball or lie prone on his tummy while he does it.

A lot of children with sensory difficulties already do a lot of sensory activities naturally, because that is their way of self-moderating (or is it self-modulating? I can't remember which - hopefully you know what I mean anyway!). So if you observe your DC doing something regularly e.g. spinning, bouncing, pacing, hanging upside down, climbing, rocking, crashing, whatever, then you can build on that by encouraging more of that sort of activity. E.g. DS naturally bounces on the beds, on the trampoline, so we do lots of that. He constantly pushes himself up on chair arms and tables with his hands, so we do lots of pushing activities (pushing his hands against mine, pushing against a wall, etc). And he loves to hang upside down e.g. off the sofa while watching TV, so we do somersaults where he holds my hand, walks his legs up my legs and tummy and flips over. Another example is that he is always running at the sofa and crashing into the soft cushions on it, so we play "crashmat", where we pile all the sofa cushions onto the floor and he can jump down onto them in a crash landing.