In a time poor world, Kid Sense brings the information that you need to your facility and tailors this professional development or general education to your facility, your team and your students. Chose from a range of topics or negotiate one that suits your facility. Workshop format can be adjusted to meet your group, the venues, and the groups interests and workshop advertising and certificate of attendance can be provided.

Topic Contents

Sensory Play:
Play and sensory play in particular, serve as the foundations to learning in general. Opportunities for repeated play involvement (of the same activity) as well as engagement in a wide range of play (whole body as well as sit down) can shape a child’s readiness to learn and attend. Activities for home, child care, kindy and school based readiness development are provided. Those focused on academic readiness will want to attend this workshop!

This workshop is ideal for kindergarten parent groups, as well as ECW’s and SSO’s.

Ready to Learn:
We typically assume that children all have the same readiness to learn, even though they then have a different capacity to develop intellectual capacity and different interest levels in learning areas. These readiness skills include; ability to attend to task, reactions to the environment around them, physical endurance, hand control for pencil and scissor skills, and planning and organization for sequential task performance.

Unfortunately not all children have the ‘ready to learn’ building blocks in place, although this only comes to light when skill delays or behavior difficulties become apparent. This can place teachers in a tricky situation as poor pre-school or school performance can be attributed to teaching instructions, rather than the hidden readiness skill gaps. Teachers and parents can begin to identify children’s readiness to learn simply be knowing what to look for, and can then support these students more effectively.

This is a must for teachers with the increasing number of children with additional needs in our classrooms (child care, preschool or school or all ages) who do not benefit from support until much later, as well as parents who are looking to provide maximum support for pres-school or school performance.

Table Top Skills:
Table top skills include tasks requiring precise hand control, including pencils, scissors and other manipulation tasks. Table top skills are obviously crucial in academic performance, but a child’s success in these skills begins long before they get to school. This workshop examines the necessary foundation skills for table top mastery (colouring, drawing, writing, cutting etc), and what you can do to help this mastery before as well as once ‘hiccups’ arise. As such, this workshop helps to enhance typical skill development for all students whilst also helping identify students at risk of delay in fine motor development.

This workshop is ideal for kindergarten and junior primary school parent and staff groups, as well as ECW’s and SSO’s.

Muscle Skills:
Children’s ability to play physically (climb, run, balance), develop table top skills (draw, cut, write), develop appropriate endurance to successfully manage the pre-school or school day, and to attend to task for an age appropriate duration is largely influenced by the ‘muscle’ skills otherwise known as fine and gross motor skills. The two skill groups are tremendously interlinked and both must be actively addressed in the home and academic setting. While these skills are assessed at school their develop begin a long time before school entry, and adults can significantly help or hinder this development by providing the ideal opportunities for play (as outlined in this workshop).

This workshops is well suited to academic settings looking at provide a broad range of school readiness play opportunities (such as child care and preschool) as well as preschools and schools running programs (such as “hop to it” or “fiddley fingers”) for children identified with fine or gross motor challenges.

Sensory Integration:
Children’s sensory reactions to the world around them significantly influence their attention, behavior and learning. We assume that children’s sensory processing (registering, integrating and responding to sensory input) is intact, yet for an increasing number our students this is not true. Sadly, Dysfunction of sensory integration is increasingly apparent (occurring independently or in conjunction with language, learning and developmental disorders). Indicators of sensory inefficiencies are usually ‘bad behaviour’, which when correctly ‘diagnosed’ and managed can help children learn and behave well. Strategies to enhance typical Sensory Processing and to minimize ineffective sensory reactions are explored.

Following this presentation, further topics are available focusing on how Sensory Processing knowledge can be used to aid attention to task.