Tactile Sensory Balls

One of the activities Jocelyn has engaged in during a therapy session to work on gross hand movement/coordination, is to lift, remove or "give-me" various weighted sensory balls.

Like with any item that is categorized as a "therapy" item, the price is out of this world crazy. I would love to be able to buy anything and everything for Jocelyn, if there was any chance at all that it would help her. What parent wouldn't want too? In the meantime, I also try and think of ways to recreate an item, think outside the box, etc so we can perhaps get the same result with a fraction of the cost.

So the other day I got to thinking about these tactile type of sensory balls that we were using, and figured I could use balloons and household items to mix up the textures, weights, etc.

I used plain old balloons and the following items in the house:

1. Dry beans
2. Rice
3. Dry noodles (elbow or shells work great)
4. Dry tapioca
5. Flour
6. Sugar
7. Cheap hair gel

Here are the filled balloons.

{You can really see the shells as they are the lumpy balloons. The flour

felt surprisingly cool as it would mold to your hand almost like clay}

You could use anything really that can either funnel or slip in the balloon one by one. I have to admit, I thought this would be a super simple task and it turned out a little more difficult to fill the balloons than I originally thought.

I filled two balloons with the same item so we could eventually play "which ones are alike." I also used 2 different colors and have more white than red so we can work on numbers and colors as well.

This probably took me at least 30-45 minutes to complete as I just didn't have the finesse I needed today, and I didn't preplan, so I had to come up with the items as I went. But for a project and learning opportunity that only cost around $5, I thought it worked pretty good! :)

  

Putting the balloons in its own labeled storage container only helps keep things that much more organized. She did really well with all the different types of balloons and it was a solid 20 minute activity!