Proprioceptive or Body Activities

Overview

All children tend to enjoy and benefit from proprioceptive or body activities, so it is a good idea to incorporate some body activities into your sensory programme.

Proprioceptive/Body activities are calming and organising and provide what we call ‘heavy work’ for the body.

How? The proprioceptive sense is one of your senses which brings information from your muscles and joints and as a result helps to organise your nervous system.

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Video resourses for helping a child

Video Playlist

3 Videos
About this video
In this video, Karen describes how children with proprioceptive or body issues can have poor spatial awareness, have poor eye-contact, difficulty understanding spatial concepts such as in/on/under/behind/beside etc. They can also be quite disorientated, with a sense of being ‘lost in space’ bumping into things and being clumsy. Proprioceptive difficulties can also impact on speech production, language comprehension and expressive language development and coordination.Karen goes onto explain how to help children with proprioceptive difficulties overcome their difficulties using the best most up to date approaches

The Proprioceptive Sense (Body)

Some examples of proprioceptive/body activities are:

  • Move furniture or rearrange books on shelves provides. Pretend to push down the walls, stretch up to the ceiling, then touch your toes.
  • Play push-and-pull games inside/outside. Stretching up to the ceiling and down to the floor a number of times.
  • Digging in sand and carrying buckets of sand.
  • Bouncing on a space-hopper with feet on the ground to provide ankle joint compression.
  • Wearing a weighted back-pack.
  • Become teacher’s helper eg taking the small chairs down at the start of the day, giving out books to each child etc
  • Lie across a therapy ball with assistance and move across the room on hands.
  • Do prescribed yoga-poses