What is it?

Story Massage is a programme for use both at school and home that combines the benefits of positive touch with the fun and creativity of words, be it a story, a song or a rhyme.

The Science

Numerous studies have linked positive physical touch with the release of a hormone called Oxytocin –also known as the ‘Cuddle Hormone”. Increased levels of Oxytocin can promote feelings of calm, trust and bonding between the giver and receiver of the massage. We use Story Massage in school usually after periods of heightened activity in order to establish a calm atmosphere, and also with individual children who may be having a tricky time and need an activity that both comforts and reassures them. At home, Story Massage would be especially effective during quiet times – say after dinner- and before bed.

How it works

At the core of the programme are ten key massage moves- known as ‘strokes’- which can be adapted and utilised in many ways and combined with a story told verbally, to create a multi-sensory experience. Once these strokes are learned each can be assigned to words in a story, with limitless possibilities. For example, the Circle Stroke involves drawing a circle on the child’s back (or another part of their body that is accessible and appropriate).  This circle could represent the sun in ‘You are my Sunshine’, a roundabout in stories about journeys, or even more abstract ideas like being lost or being unable to make a decision. The only limit is your imagination! Prior to starting, be sure to ask the child’s permission to perform the massage on them. For non-verbal children be alert to any signs that they do not want or are no longer enjoying the massage.

A multi-sensory approach

Story Massage offers an opportunity for children of all abilities to engage with story-telling. In Story Massage sessions, children are not required to follow along with a story visually- following pictures or words- meaning sessions are rewarding and engaging for visually impaired children. Touch-evasive children are able to focus on the auditory element of the story-telling if they do not want to be touched, and conversely; children who have a hearing impairment can focus on the touch alone to tell the story. The accessibility of the Story Massage Programme for all children means that it is a session that is often enjoyed as a whole class, a rare opportunity to have all of our children learning and working alongside each other.

Benefits

• Story Massage requires no props or materials, you simply need your hands. Therefore it can be done anywhere with little preparation.
• The massage can be performed anywhere on the body, not just the back, making it great for children with limited mobility or who don’t enjoy contact on certain areas.
• The massage improves calmness, concentration and social skills.
• Can help with communication and building respect and positive relationships.

Give it a go!

Included in this blog is an example of a massage story ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ for you to try at home. There are also videos uploaded regularly to Tapestry and the Story Massage Programme You Tube and Vimeo channels showing different massage stories which you can follow along with at home. If you require any more information or would like to be sent some materials to help you start using the Story Massage Programme at home please get in touch!

 

Incy Wincy Spider for Cherry Garden

There are so many fun and simple art activities which you can explore at home. At school, we like to focus on open-ended art activities rather than trying to achieve a specific outcome (process-led art). This allows your child to be creative without any pressure to create a specific design or object at the end. In this way, you can explore colour, texture, shape, space and position and see how your creation changes.

Transient art is one kind of process-led art which is easy to do at home and less messy than painting activities. Here is a quick video explaining transient art and giving some ideas for home.

Some other great open-ended art ideas for home:

Junk modelling provides so many creative opportunities, and makes use of your recycling box! You can explore, shape and size and use your imagination to create anything you want. Practice using tools such as scissors and joining things together with glue or tape.

If you’ve got a salad spinner at home, try out one of our favourite art activities. Put a paper plate or circle of card inside the spinner and squirt in some paint before closing and spinning! Lots of fun watching it spin, and you get a different result every time!

Dressing up and creating costumes is a great creative activity. You can use any clothes and accessories, but bright colours and patterns are fun to explore. You could create a costume for a particular character or job role, thinking about what that person might wear.

You can explore making textured paint brushes using natural materials. Collect some different shapes and sizes of leaves, flowers and sticks to use for making marks with paint. You can hold them in your hands, tie the leaves to a stick handle or use pegs to grip them.

Story Massage is a method of story-telling using both words and touch and provides a relaxing and engaging way of telling stories to your child. The element of touch helps to create a special moment for you and your child to come together and enjoy a story in a way which is both calming and relevant to them. It is a good idea to create a calm space to share the story and repeat the same story several times over a few weeks so that they become familiar with the activity. Some children may even be able to take part in doing the story massage for their siblings once they remember the strokes for the story.

There are 10 key ‘strokes’ that make up the Story Massage programme, and you are able to make up your own stories using these strokes, which you can then use to create periods of calm and relaxation with your child throughout the day.

Here Jack demonstrates two massage stories which you can follow along with at home and there are some additional stories with text and instructions.

For more information and story ideas, go to www.storymassage.co.uk. They also have storytelling sessions which you can join on their Facebook page.

Musical activities are very engaging for a lot of our pupils and are a great way of engaging them with learning in a range of contexts. Here are a few of our favorite online and app-based musical learning activities.

Free online resources:

• www.ianbean.co.uk/senict-members-resource-portal/ Ian Bean’s website has lots of free to download ICT activities covering a range of topics. The cause and effect games with music are a great way of engaging children who are just learning about how to control a touch screen or switches. They have a musical reward each time the child presses the button correctly.
• musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/ A range of fun and simple musical apps for cause and effect, creating beats and exploring a range of instrumental sounds online.
• bouncyballs.org/ Make the balls bounce by making noise. They go still when you are quiet. Good for loud and quiet exploration or just practicing vocalising to make the balls move.
• Magic piano app (find it in the google play or app store) Press the dots to play along with a piece of music. Good for basic cause and effect.

Paid for apps: (find them in the google play or app store)

• Kapu Bloom Tunes app. Draw on the petals of a flower, listening to the sounds it makes, then water the flower to watch it grow, and play the sounds in your drawing by spinning the flowers.
• Duckie Deck Homemade Orchestra app. Make sound with a range of everyday objects eg keys, doorbell. Create your own compositions and explore sounds around the environment.
• Loopimal app. Create a looping beat by dragging the shapes onto the track. The animals make different shapes for each sound.
• Talking Carl and Gugl app. Fun and silly app which listens to what you say or sings and repeats it back in a silly voice… hours of fun!

Our wonderful music teacher Geoffa creates lots of fun, interactive songs to promote engagement with creating music and rhythms. Here is a selection of our favourite songs which you can join in with at home!

Meditation or relaxation activities are a great way of connecting to a range of senses and providing time for your child to calm and focus on a shared activity. In this video, Blanca explains some of the techniques and resources we use in school to create a multisensory meditation experience. If you have some relaxing scents, massage creams and lights at home, this is a simple activity to share with your child.

Yoga is an excellent activity for increasing body awareness, supporting emotional and sensory regulation and increasing focus. At school, we use regular yoga sessions combined with calming relaxation and these sessions take place during PE and PSED lessons. At home, try using yoga as a way to wake up the body in the morning or to stretch and calm ready for bed in the evening.

It is often a good idea to follow a set yoga routine so that your child can learn the positions and actions and become more confident in moving their body purposefully and calmly. It is best if you join in and model the correct positions so that they can see the movements their body should be making. It is a great activity for the whole family!

Here is our movement teacher Nicola with some yoga sessions which can be adapted to a range of needs:

Below are two yoga stories which we often use in school. The story element helps to give your child an easy to remember structure to follow.

There are so many opportunities for practising maths concepts at home and in the community. Counting is a complex skill and your child will need to understand some general maths concepts before being ready to move on to counting and calculations. It is a good idea to support your child by using mathematical language to comment on their actions and explore these ideas in real-world contexts.

Some of the concepts and keywords you might want to explore are:

• Now and next
• Filling and emptying containers, fitting shapes in to shape sorters or inset puzzles
• Stacking and building (on and off)
• Big and small
• Matching and sorting colour
• More, one and lots
• Sorting by shape, size and type
• Using positional language in a range of contexts (over, under, in, out etc)
• Counting and using numbers in sequence
• Ordering objects by size, length or height
• Heavy and light
• Making repeating patterns

Here are some activity ideas in everyday situations:

As well as being good for learning life skills, helping with the laundry can be a great way to practice some maths concepts! Count items, fill and empty the basket, find pairs, match colours and patterns and sort big and small items.

There are lots of opportunities for learning maths concepts outdoors in a garden or green space. You could learn about ‘full’ and ’empty’ with plant pots, count seeds into the soil, find big and small leaves or flowers and practice some positional language.

Sorting is great for developing an understanding of mathematical language. If you have some toy animals, why not try sorting them into big and small? You can sort all kinds of objects, try sorting by size, colour type or shape. Great for helping with tidying up too!

Building and construction activities are fun for practising the positional language. At home you could try Lego, junk modelling, balancing natural objects and stacking cardboard boxes. Comment on the position as you build to learn lots of keywords.

You can also find out about how we use Heuristic play to support mathematical development here.

Resources:

Sensory messy play is a great way for children to practice their fine motor skills and learn how to use tools. You can also use this activity to work on lots of different learning skills, below are a few ideas for you to try.

Rice, pasta, dry cereal etc:

Pour the rice or pasta into a bowl or tray. Give your child cups, spoons, scoops, sieves etc to use with the messy play. Look around the kitchen for items that will be fun to use.

Let the child explore the messy play tray by touching, scooping, filling containers and pouring back out again. This will help them to develop their fine-motor skills and will teach them to use different tools for a purpose.

Your role is to play alongside and model new actions and explorations. Your child won’t necessarily copy you straight away, but by showing them different ideas of things they could do, they will gradually experiment more.

You can also introduce key words to comment on what you or they are doing. For example, counting as you drop pieces of pasta into a bowl or saying ‘full’, ‘empty’, ‘in’, ‘scoop’ etc as they fill and pour with containers. This will teach them key language and what it means in a practical way. We have included a chat board with key words and symbols to support their play, but use the words that are most relevant to the actions they choose to carry out.

Shredded paper:

Shredded paper is a nice sensory tactile experience. You could hide some of their favourite toys inside the paper for them to look for and find or add shapes, numbers or toy animals. When they find an item, you can name it for them. If they are able to match items, you could have pairs of items hidden for them to find and match.

Cornflour:

Cornflour can be used for lots of different messy play activities. If you have a wide, shallow tray or a large plate, you can sprinkle the dry cornflour and use a paintbrush or fingers to do mark-making activities. Model making different marks in the powder, moving up and down or making circles. Some children might be able to copy letter shapes.

If you’re happy for a little more mess, add some water to the cornflour, about half as much water as flour. When you grab or squeeze the wet cornflour, it will become solid, and when you let go it will drip and flow. This is great fun to use with whisks, colanders and spoons.

Below are some recipe ideas for other messy play materials which you can explore at home:

Mark-making is a term used to describe pre-writing activities which encourage children to take notice of the marks they are making and start to experiment with a range of different marks and materials. These activities could be done using pens and crayons on paper, using art materials such as paints and pastels or even screen-based, for example using iPad apps. It is always easiest to start with large-scale mark-making before trying to work on small shapes, as smaller movements require more fine motor skill and control.

The series of progression for the types of marks made could look like this:

• Random marks, but the child is noticing the effects of their movements and actions
• Experimenting with directional marks (horizontal and vertical lines, circles)
• Writing patterns (zig-zag, wavy lines, dots etc)
• Pre-letter shapes (horizontal, vertical and diagonal straight lines, x,+, triangle and square shapes)
• Tracing letters
• Copying letters
• Writing letters

If your child is still not able to make all of the pre-letter shapes confidently, it is useful to try lots of fun activities to practice these basic shapes rather than focusing on letters and numbers. 

For many of our students, their difficulty with fine motor skills will prevent them from being confident in writing letters and they may find it easier to use typing as their main form of writing. Practising letter matching games can help to develop the skills needed for typing later on.

Here Anna describes some of the fun and sensory ways in which we encourage mark-making in school using music and movement:

Here are some ideas for other mark-making activities that can be done at home:

Mark-making with paint and toy car wheels. Roll the cars through the paint and then make a range of lines and marks with the wheels as you drive them across the paper! You can also try stamping toy people and animal feet to see the shapes they make.

Scatter lovely smelling spices on the table or in a tray and have fun making shapes and lines in them with fingers or brushes.

Fine Motor Skills

As well as providing lots of opportunities for exploring mark-making, fine motor activities are an important part of developing independence and accuracy in a range of everyday tasks. Fine motor activities will help to strengthen and refine finger movements and allow your child to be more accurate with holding writing tools and making different marks.

Disco dough is a fun way of practicing fine motor skills; here Blanca shows you how to complete this activity at home:

Here are some ideas for other fine motor activities that are easy to do using things around the home:

Cooking is lots of fun and is a great way to practice fine motor skills. Use child-safe knives, a grater and a peeler to make a range of different dishes. Your child will develop their grip, strength and accuracy.

Threading is a good way of practising control and developing a pincer grip. Dried pasta shapes are an interesting way of practising threading, either on to spaghetti sticks or a ribbon or string.

Cutting and sticking are simple fine motor activities for children who are more confident with tools. For earlier stages, you can use a pincer grip to tear strips of the paper to stick on to a collage, like these lovely jungle leaf pictures!

Here are some useful resources: