“Craftfulness” - crafty healing “Craftfulness” is a term created by Rosemary Davidson and Arzu Tahsin (2018) that pairs mindfulness alongside craft-making to ‘achieve moments of calm’ and ‘mend yourself by making things’. Davidson and Tahsin in their book explore mindfulness, positive psychology, and creativity research in the act of making something through craft and how that impacts the mental well-being of an individual. ‘Making things makes us happy because pleasure and p

One of the senses that not many people are aware of! Interoception – one of the senses that provides our brain with feedback about how we’re feeling on the inside. Receptors for this sense are found in our organs to tell us when we feel hungry, too nervous or too hot. If your child has trouble with processing the information given by this sense, he/she would have difficulty knowing when they are full, learning toilet training. Overall, it is likely that they have trouble with

Fun Exercises to do at home! Bring the zoo into the home 😀 Give these animal walks a try with your little one. It helps with developing gross motor skills, core strength and it’s loads of fun! As OTs we use these animal walks in session to help the child develop core strength and gross motor skills in a fun way to keep them engaged. However, it is just as important that the child practices at home too! If a child has poor core strength, it means that they will have difficult

Found objects in art therapy One of the directives we have been exploring at Kids Inspired is asking the kids to bring a memento or object that is important to them to their art therapy sessions. ‘Found objects’ can be any everyday objects that we either find around the house or out in the world. We’ve had so many different items coming through our doors like rocks they found on family holidays, an artwork they’ve made in school or even a scrap piece of fabric from an old toy

Postcard Art Therapy One of our latest art therapy directives has been generating some great results at Kids Inspired, and that’s creating an emotive postcard. These postcards are designed as a private space to communicate some feelings to someone that will never receive it. At the beginning of the activity, we ask participants to reflect on a person or experience that they have felt frustrated, sad or happy about. The child is encouraged to design a postcard, modelling it of

There is a pesky fly buzzing around your house! When you follow its path with your eyes so that you can catch it you are using visual tracking! Visual tracking is simply focusing on an object as it moves across a person’s visual field. This skill is important for almost all daily activities, including reading, writing, cutting with scissors, drawing, and playing. Typically, the ability to visually track objects emerges in children around the age of five. You might see problem

Parents have been, and always will be, the MOST important member of our team. No one knows their child better than a parent does. Parents often play a critical role in both giving us insight into their child and also their role in carryover and generalisation in regards to therapy goals and targets. Parents in therapy sessions are crucial for so many different things such as: - helping manage behaviour and sustaining an activity - helping to facilitate language and establis

Does my kid’s pencil grasp need fixing? How am I supposed to know? Like any other milestones (rolling over -> crawling -> first steps -> walking -> running), pencil grasp has its own progression. 1. Fist grasp 2. Digital Pronate grasp 3. Tripod grasp: This is the IDEAL pencil grasp! OR Quadrapod grasp: Sometimes the child might be using 4 fingers (everything in tripod grasp + the ring finger) to control the pencil. This is also a functional grasp. There

Collaborative Art-Making Lately we’ve started to explore collaborative art-making during our art therapy sessions with some of the kids that struggle to engage with art-making on their own. Collaborative art therapy sessions offer individuals and groups opportunities to learn how to work together, resolve conflicts, work through trauma, develop social and communication skills, and a safe place for expression. (Malchiodi, 2012). It’s not unusual for a child to find a blank

Art Therapy online - how does it work? Often we get enquiries from our parents asking how can you do art therapy through a computer screen? The structure and delivery of the session is not that different from an in-person art therapy session. It just requires a little bit more pre-planning before the session and a dialogue between the parent and therapist. Art Therapy online is also a terrific alternative for our out of the area families who don’t want to travel too far but a