Spring Activities
The first day of Spring Tuesday, March 19th! We found a few fun activities you can do to help celebrate the changing of the seasons. Keep in mind all activities can be modified to any skill level, whether you’re working with someone not ready to sit down for a few minutes to complete an activity or someone who can probably teach you to do it instead. Make the activity fit you! Don’t force yourself to follow any activity to the letter if it’s not enjoyable or skill-level-appropriate.
When your goal is to incorporate teaching into everyday fun activities, make sure you have in mind what targets you’d like to focus on. This way, while you’re busy enjoying the activity and containing messes, you’re more likely to remember to incorporate your specific chosen skill! It’s much more challenging in the moment to think about which skill we want to teach and think about the best ways to present it while also avoiding getting paint in your hair.
Just like the best art, fun is objective. The goal of these activities is to have fun and learn. Sometimes, it’s easy to focus on making your art look precisely like the picture-perfect blog example. But we all know real life isn’t often like that! So please, take these ideas as fun suggestions and be sure to modify them to best suit your life and the skills the learner in your life is working on.
First up, we have a “Flower Soup” sensory activity. This one is pretty simple and straightforward but can be a lot of fun for us sensory seekers. Start off by finding an empty bin and foraging around for some flowers. Wildflowers in the grass, a few off your neighbor's bush, the dandelions in the back yard. This can be a fun learning opportunity in itself. Practicing scanning the environment, following a point to “look!”, using a pincer grasp to pluck each flower, and describing the colors you see!
Now, of course, if your neighbors get prickly if you take a few buds off their bush, you can also buy a cheap bouquet of wildflowers at any grocery store or even artificial ones from your local dollar store to reuse. But once our flowers are secured, we just need to add them to our bin and add water. While splashing around with our flower soup is likely enough fun for many, we can also take it up a notch by adding a few more “ingredients.” You can try bath toys, food coloring, and, my favorite, glitter!
Pro tip#1: the night before making flower soup, freeze a few flowers in an ice cube and try to add another layer to the sensory experience.
Pro tip #2: you also might want to do this one outside; vigorous splashing can occur when the fun is being had.
Ways to incorporate teaching
Listener skills:
Instructions (make them as simple or complex as needed)
Give me the flower.
Dump the flowers in the water.
Stir it up.
Add two drops of food coloring and then stir it up.
After you stir up the flower soup, fill a cup with water and give it to me.
Communication skills:
Labeling or tacts
I see a pink flower
That flower has three leaves
Fill-Ins
Oh no, the floor is all (pause for fill-in) wet!
Singing ‘itsy-bitsy Spider’ while making it rain.
Next up, we have another way to use your neighbor's flowers with “Flower Prints.” For this activity, it might be a little easier to ensure you have flowers with bigger petals. A nice big sunflower or large daisy would be great. With a few blobs of paint, we can take each flower, dip it into the paint, and press it onto blank paper to see what kind of prints we can make. You can turn this into a matching activity by matching up the color of the flower to the color of the paint we splash it in!
Ways to incorporate teaching
Motor Skills
Fine
Using a pincer grasp to pick up flowers by the stem.
Coordination is used to stamp flowers onto paper.
Cognitive
Matching the color of the flower to the color of the paint.
Social Skills
Have multiple kids? Cousins? Neighbors?
Children can take turns asking and sharing materials.
Great opportunities to make comments about the activity.
Can ask each other questions about their favorite colors and flowers.
Our final Spring activity is an age-old favorite: peanut butter pine cones! Substitute for any other nut or sun butter, of course. Pine cone bird feeders can be a great way to work on motor and self-help skills. Manipulating a knife and spreading peanut butter on each part of the pine cone while practicing smoothing it out target both! Sprinkling the seeds to cover all the peanut (or sun, almond, etc.) butter requires multiple motor skills. Plus, once you’ve hung up the feeder, there will hopefully be more opportunities when watching the birds. Like following a point to look, labeling birds, and describing what they look like.
For this activity, practice some fine motor and coordination skills by spreading peanut butter on each leaf of a pine cone. This can also double as practice for self-help skills, as spreading with a knife can often be a focus area. Once your pine cone is sufficiently covered, dump your birdseed of choice all over to cover the peanut butter as best you can. Pro tip: do this over a plate or empty bin to catch the birdseed. Unless of course, you would then like your learner to practice vacuuming or sweeping.
The real fun with this activity is when you finally get a hungry visitor! If you can, place the pine cone in a visible spot to catch opportunities to talk about what you see.
Ways to incorporate teaching
Communication
Intraverbals
Questions: What do you see?
What color is that bird?
What sound does a bird make?
What do birds eat?
Tacts/Labeling
I see a red bird!
Look, there are two birds!
The birds are eating seeds.
Don’t forget, these activities are meant to be FUN! If you’re laughing and your bird feeder is only half covered, or you have more paint on your hands than the flower prints, but you’re having fun, then you’re doing it right. All of the ways to incorporate teaching can be modified to fit any activity. And they can all be modified to fit each individual skill level. Ultimately, the goal is to realize learning can happen throughout the day in many fun ways. If there are specific focus areas to work on, have them in mind before beginning your activity so you can be sure to incorporate them.
We pulled these activities from Taming Little Monsters and Artful Parent. Go check them out for other great ideas for Spring!
