Ep. 79 Sensory Breaks for the Classroom
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What is the main challenge teachers face with sensory needs in group classrooms?
What's up, everyone? And welcome to Making the Shift for Autistic Kids. We're an SLP couple from California with four boys. And we're here every week to bring you neuro-affirming tips, tricks, and tools. Are you ready to make the shift? Let's do this. Hello, hello. Welcome to Making the Shift. Today we are talking all about how we can help our kids,
our students, to be more regulated in the classroom simply by thinking more about how we are creating their daily routines. Questions I get a lot are, you know, but I see kids in a group setting. How can I possibly accommodate every child's individual sensory need when I'm in a group setting? You know, whether you're a therapist who is going into a classroom and doing full group activities or you're pulling kids out for groups, or if you're a teacher who obviously has a group of students that you are responsible for every day. And I think one of the biggest barriers that people have to using sensory strategies and thinking more about sensory is, but how is this gonna affect the whole group? How is this going to affect the whole class?
And it's funny because although yes, we all have individual sensory needs, a lot of sensory activities will benefit a child no matter what their sensory needs are, right? Our goal is to help kids to remain regulated. And what kid doesn't benefit from getting more movement throughout their day, right? What kid doesn't benefit from having opportunities to calm down or decompress, right? These are things that benefit all kids. And I really believe that if we just put a little bit more energy into the front end of planning, we will see... it pay off in the back end of our kids being more regulated in the classroom. So an analogy I always use is a seesaw because this is so easy. So if you're a parent and you could talk to, you know, think about this in terms of your child, or if you're a teacher, think about it in terms of your students, professional terms of your kids, right?
But if we think of a child's regulation as a seesaw, Our goal is for them to remain balanced as much as possible, right? We want them to be regulated. And when they're seesaw balanced, this is when they are going to be in their most ready to learn regulated state. This is where we want them for learning. Okay, so. Does it matter if they're at home plopped down on the TV and they're not in their most regulated, ready to learn state? No, of course we want them to be comfortable, but at that point after school, they might be like drowsy, they might be tired, they might just wanna just chill out, not be answering a bunch of questions or be put in a learning opportunity. So of course this is very much dependent on where they are and then what state we want them in to be in at the time.
Okay, that being said, our goal of school is academics, social, right? So to get our kids regulated enough so that they are learning and to get them regulated enough so that they are able to enjoy socializing and being around their peers. So if we think about their regulation as a seesaw, our goal is to keep them balanced as much as possible. Now, I like to think of a tipped seesaw as representing a dysregulated child. So something happens to them, they might get dysregulated really slowly, they might get dysregulated really quickly, but our goal whenever they're dysregulated is to bring them back to center because that's where we need them to be, to be in that regulated, most ready to learn state.
So right now, it feels we are very much in the business of solving the dysregulation problem, meaning a kid is dysregulated. What can we do to help them? So we're really not focusing that much on how can we be more proactive with sensory needs. And that's something that I just preach over and over is how can we be more proactive and less reactive. But because right now it's very much about reactive. It's very much, oh, you look dysregulated, go to the calming corner. and come back when you feel better, right? But like if the child's day was set up differently so that they never needed that calming corner because there were activities that were already given to them or provided for them in their day, keeping them regulated, then we wouldn't have to go send a kid to the calming corner.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main challenge teachers face with sensory needs in group classrooms?
0:08–11:27
2
How does the seesaw analogy explain balanced sensory regulation for students?
11:27–16:52
3
Why is proactive routine planning more effective than reactive calming corners?
16:52–22:36
4
What criteria determine when to use calming versus alerting sensory activities?
22:36–22:38
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
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Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)