Some children with sensory motor integration deficits can be stimulated using mouth or hands. Allow the child to keep a suck-type water bottle on his desk and a squeeze ball in his pocket as a general strategy during teaching to develop sensory motor skills. Encourage him to chew something like a straw, coffee stick, or theratubing on a pencil end to facilitate concentration during class. Provide him with firm gum or licorice to chew prior to instruction or during work time.
Use deep-pressure strategies to handle touch sensitivity in some children who need sensory inputs to stay focused. Allow the child to use a vibrational pen for sensory stimulation prior to a writing assignment. Let the child handle a fidget toy in his right hand as it is known to stimulate the left side of the brain; this is a sensory strategy used to improve language processing. Encourage modified push-ups prior to a writing assignment to enable improved fine motor control while writing; ask the student to hold his hands on the chair in a seated position and lift his body up.
Encourage the child to run, climb ropes, jump in mini-trampolines, or swing in monkey bars during recess, or schedule specific activities like gymnastics, karate, and horseback riding to provide opportunities for vestibular stimulation. Playing catch with a heavy ball or moving heavy objects like books or desks helps to overcome vestibular sensitivity. Let the child sit in air-filled cushions during class to allow movement while being seated; this can have a calming effect in kids with sensory defensiveness. Use of large therapy balls has also shown success in developing sensory motor skills; ask the child to roll his body over the ball or sit and bounce on the ball.
The multisensory methods or visual auditory kinesthetic (VAK) modalities enable learning through more than one sense. VAK teaching method makes use of touch and movement to give the child’s brain tactile and kinesthetic memories along with visual and auditory ones. Encourage the child to run fingers on an alphabet made of sandpaper to give them a tactile memory. Ask the child to draw the alphabet in a really big format in the air to enable kinesthetic learning from body movement, or to draw the alphabet using hands on the carpet to make really big shapes; the latter method enables both tactile and kinesthetic movement. Another method of giving a strong tactile memory is to encourage the child to make models of letters using plasticine, play-dough or clay. To give a visual and auditory memory for the word "bed," tell the child the letters "b" and "d" are sticks with half-circles in the base; say out the word loud for an auditory impact as you show a picture illustration of a child lying down on the "b" with the upright portion of the letter forming the head of the bed and the upright portion of the letter "d" forming the foot of the bed. This audio visual impact gives strong memory of the letters and the word.