 Hello, this is Pookey and today in three things to try we're exploring three simple sensory strategies for children who have become dysregulated. So we're going to start with chewing. Chewing is fantastic, it can help to regulate tension by activating the mouth muscles, giving us something to focus in on and activating different senses than those that might be causing the kind of overwhelm for children who have become over responsive. It's great for both under responsive children and over responsive children. So under responsive children are those who perhaps might seem to have zoned out, who are finding it really difficult to focus, who aren't getting enough sensory input right now. We can increase that sensory input by giving them something to chew. On the other hand are over responsive children, those children for whom the environment seems suddenly too noisy in any sense of the word, so that might be too much noise from kind of visual input, it might be too much auditory input, it might just be too much of something. So they're over responsive, but them chewing can feel calming and reassuring and give them something to focus in on away from those overwhelming things that are assaulting their senses. So great strategy because it kind of works for both. And in terms of how it can happen, we'll find that loads of our kids will go to chewing as a self-regulatory strategy anyway. You might spend a lot of time telling children to take that pen out of your mouth or stop chewing on your coat or don't chew your hair. That's quite a familiar sound for many parents, carers, teachers, teaching assistants and so on. That child maybe trying to kind of regulate how they feel. So you might prefer instead to provide an actual chewing aid and we'll talk about them over the page or gum or sweets or something that you're happy for them to chew on and thinking about keeping it nice and sanitary too. So in terms of what we can actually try, what does chewing look like in practice? So you might invest in a Chewy for a child there are hundreds of these online. You can get bracelets, necklaces, key fobs, there's all sorts of different things which are designed to be safe for children to chew. Now it's worth looking into these a little bit and experimenting with the particular child if you can because some are harder, some are softer. We find that when children start chewing with these kinds of things sometimes their jaw gets really really sore at first so we need to just kind of almost like build up the muscles not almost actually build up the muscles so they get used to this chewing because it's really helpful. They'll find it really helpful, they'll keep doing it and then they might get kind of really sore jaw. So we're going to build up to it and you might find that over time they need firmer things to chew on as their sort of mouth muscles do get stronger. So yeah you can provide them with a Chewy, there's loads and loads and loads of them available online or through your occupational therapist. You might also think about supporting regulation through the day by putting Chewy foods into a child's lunchbox or something that they can go to at the lunch break. Again loads of different Chewy snacks and foods that you might choose to put in there. The house one of our favourites is the kind of dried mango that you can get that's super super Chewy and one of the nice things about using food like this is that it can be really regulating for a child without it appearing that they're doing something different than their mates. They're just eating their lunch or having their snack. So you might think about that and this can provide a nice sensory break for a child at points throughout the day when break and lunch comes up. And then a final thing that you might do is in those moments of overwhelm actually provide the child with something to chew on in terms of food. So you might give them some Haribo or other kind of gummy or jelly sweet or you might give them some Chewing gum and when we give them those sort of foods to chew on or a Chewy snack we can be talking to them about focusing in on the senses, really thinking about how that tastes, really thinking about the mouth feel of it, really focusing in on that food item that we've given it. Final strategy number two today is deep pressure. This is one that doesn't get talked about too much. So you've probably thought about or heard about chewing before but deep pressure maybe, maybe not. So this is about the fact that when we calmly apply kind of deep pressure that it sort of soothes the brain, it sends messages to our nervous system saying, oh it's okay things are all right. So kind of light touch when things kind of brush past us tends to put us on like high alert because this could be danger, this could be something might hurt us. But calmly applied sort of expected deep pressure is kind of really, really deeply reassuring like how having a big hug from someone that you really love just makes you feel good. That's the kind of feeling that we're going for here and it's something that we naturally do do for children when they're feeling overwhelmed often is just reach them into a bear hug. So that's what we're looking for in terms of the feel that the child's going to get in terms of their sort of sensory and nervous response here. It can be really, really helpful for children who have gone into that kind of fight flight freeze type mode who are over responsive to their environment, we're getting that sort of trauma or challenge response and they need support to calm down and to regulate. And in terms of how we do it we'll think about the practicals or try this in a moment but one thing just to be really aware of here is the brain will habituate to deep touch. If you've got something heavy weighing on you or something holding you or what have you after sort of 20 or 30 minutes then your brain just gets used to that feeling and it won't have the same sort of positive impact anymore. So what the occupational therapists tend to suggest is that you might use these ideas for 20 or 30 minutes maximum at a time, take a break for an hour or so in between and then return to them. The caveat to that is you can kind of hack this by kind of keeping things moving so instead of sitting with a weighted blanket on you, you might be carrying heavy things around for example and if we're kind of moving and that input is changing then the brain won't habituate in the same way but generally as a rule of thumb these are strategies that we use for sort of shorter periods to calm things down then the child would return to normal day to day sessions rather than it being something that they would have kind of all the time like for example the chewing which they can do any time. So what does this look like in practice? What other things that you can actually try? So you can invest in weighted blankets or pressure vests so these are specific items again that you can buy online or access via your occupational therapist who can give you really good advice on this. These are quite sort of specialist items so although they're widely available your occupational therapist if you have one will be able to give you really really good advice on what will work best for your child in this situation but weighted blankets essentially are as they sound, they're blankets that have little weights in they can weigh an absolute tonne and they provide pressure. You can also get kind of strips to go around the neck and things like that and then pressure vests create the input by being blown up rather than weighed down so they're a little bit more practical to kind of carry around and that sort of thing but provides a similar kind of input. You can also get weighted like toys or we have sometimes used things like you know you can buy door stops that look like dogs or cats or elephants or something that are like quite cute from places like Wayfair or Dun Elm and things like that and they're designed as door stops but they're basically cute looking toys that are kind of heavy they can work really really well for this too. Another thing you can try is child being held or holding themselves so this is actually kind of trying to simulate that that kind of hug and this might be being held by trusted adult actually even just deep pressure on a hand like reaching out holding a hand perhaps you've got a child who's become really dysregulated and they're kind of you know lying on the floor feel completely unreachable reaching out taking their hand giving their hand a good hold can make a really big difference here and help them to begin to calm but yeah hugging themselves can help to provide some of this input being held by someone they trust this is why that's such a calming thing when a child seems really overwhelmed and equally I say this with more many of you know more my cat sat on my lap she sat on my lap right now providing lovely deep pressure for me and again a pet can be a great way for a child to receive deep pressure and then finally if you're looking to kind of apply deep pressure within or between lessons within school and then a really really helpful thing here can be to actually give a kid really heavy stuff to carry around not like too heavy for them but nice heavy things a pile of books a bag of balls for games something that that kind of you know they're going to feel that heaviness against them and feeling that heaviness carrying around those heavy things can again provide this this deep pressure input and again this is a lovely strategy because we can use it in those difficult times the transition moments within lessons we're moving items around the classroom or between lessons moving from lesson to lesson might give the child items to carry and again this is the sort of thing that can be done that doesn't really make the child stand out in any way if that's something that they're really sensitive to and can really aid with those trickier transition moments for children who might be likely to become overwhelmed otherwise strategy number three is one you'll all be aware of because at some point you will have had a classroom full of fidget toys so fiddling and fiddling is is one that we have to be really careful of because we want to get it right by not picking any kind of fidgets or fiddles that are going to irritate us as the adult or irritate or kind of cause a tricky reaction in other children within the classroom but fiddling is great because actually it can calm our over responsive children and it can activate our under responsive children much like chewing and it can mean if we get it right these kind of fidgeting and fiddling type activities can enable a child to continue to engage with activities that might otherwise have become either overwhelming for them or from which they might have totally zoned out and felt unable to continue to focus on the key thing here is to make sure that you're finding something that works for the individual but it's also acceptable to the whole class and to you as the adult so again many kids will self-regulate by fiddling they might start clicking their pen that might make you want to throw them out the window don't throw them out the window it's really really not good for them not good for your career instead we maybe look for some different fidgets or fiddles which are less irritating they do exist so what does this look like in practice there are hundreds of different things out there that one might try I think it's good often to think about what might a child have with them anyway or what can you provide really easily or cheaply so I love bits of string shoelaces hair bands kids often have these to hand anyway you can whack a hair band around a child's wrist and that's quite a normal thing to have there they'll often have one anyway and they can be twirled they can be knotted they can be wrapped around the fingers and the great thing with them is they don't make noise hurrah and you might keep a ball of string in your draw and give a child the length of it when they need it it can be used for finger knitting twirling twiddling string is great and cheap and quiet hurrah other things putty or kneaded rubber these can feel good you can get loads and loads and loads of different putties my daughter Lyra is a massive fan she's got something like 20 different types of a kind of putty called Aaron's putty which she used to get imported from America at great cost using her pocket money but it comes in different flavours it smells different textures so some is harder to squeeze some is lighter some changes colour some has different shapes and it's you know there's so many different kinds of putty equally you might just go to an art supply shop and buy a needed razor or needed rubber which feels really good can be carried around in a pencil case and can also be used to rub out mistakes hurrah putty and like needed rubbers and stuff are great because you can shape them into all sorts of different shapes they're really really tactile and they don't make noise hurrah finally fidget toys there's so so many fidget toys out there kids love them and collect them and they are like totally socially acceptable amongst kids the key thing is again looking for the quiet ones and trying not to break the banks so some of the really really popular ones that we found are tangles which can be joined together endlessly there's loads of different textures out there they're really fun and quite pretty and they don't make loads of noise and kush balls which are really really stretchy and they feel nice in your hands again there's loads of different colours and all that kind of thing and then poppets which come in such an array of different colours different sizes you can get games with poppets you can get you name it you can do it with poppets so these are ones that we found to be particular popular but there are a whole ton of fidget toys available but as I say just be aware of whether they're going to make noise and irritate you or not we've thought about three different strategies we've thought about chewing we've thought about deep pressure we've thought about fiddling this is the bit where if you're watching this together you pause or if you're leading the session you ask your colleagues to come together and discuss and you think about with reference to those three different ideas what are you already doing what can you share in terms of good practice amongst the group that's already working well let's let's cherry pick some ideas from each other and magpie what's working well in other people's experience already then think together what could we try do we need to invest any time effort energy or a little bit of budget into any of these ideas what might be worth a go and then what are we actually going to do next what will we do tomorrow in order to make a bit of a difference from something that we have learned in this little session today so just take a few minutes to talk about this together because the input is one thing me giving you the ideas but actually it's what you do with them that really really makes a difference so hit pause have a chat make a plan finally I love to leave you with a couple of recommendations to follow on for further learning I would recommend that you read sensory solutions in the classroom whether you're a classroom practitioner or a parent or carer this book has really nice background about the neuroscience and the what is going on with your child but it also has an absolute ton of really good ideas things that you can try to support your child as well so I'd really recommend that it's also just a very beautifully put together book I just love it then there's a video that Lyra made with me she shared some of her favorite fidgets for use in the classroom so these are fidgets which are quiet and won't irritate anyone too much which is very important and then finally do check out the flag house sensory channel on YouTube they don't appear to be creating new content anymore but it's an absolute treasure trove of old content sort of two three four minute long videos on all sorts of things that are sensory they're brilliantly produced and just a really good dip into a whole ton of different ideas shared by occupational therapists I hope that the session was helpful good luck using the ideas and do come back to me tweet me drop me an email whatever send me a carrier pigeon about how you've used these ideas and what other topics you would like to see in the future thank you