Tour My Sensory Room

I'm so excited to show you our school's sensory room. I'm Michelle with the Autism Helper. I'm a primary self-contained special education teacher, and this is my sensory room. Let's take a look. This is our school's sensory room. This was created by some amazing occupational therapists that service our district. My school has a large special education caseload. We have 8 classes that service special education students, and many other students in our school have occupational therapy needs. So this room is used by quite a bit of our students. Over here we have some alerting activities to use with our students. This is called the Jungle Jumperoo. This is great for alerting, motor planning, balance, and social skills when used correctly. Over here is our trampoline. This is also an alerting activity. It can also be used as a heavy work activity. For those kids that are— that get overstimulated really easily. This is our platform swing. When used appropriately, this can be very calming or alerting for students, but you must be very careful not to overstimulate. And we want to always go in slow motions in one direction and then reverse that motion slowly to calm the students. You never want to go several different directions because you will overstimulate students. One of my absolute favorite tools in our sensory room is this slide. It looks like a simple slide, but it can be used in so many ways. If you have a student that is overstimulated, have them crawl up the slide using their hands and feet. That's a very good heavy work activity, but it's also fun. Students can also attach a rope by linking it here, and then they can practice rope climbing up the slide as well. If you have students that are understimulated and need alerting activities, they can climb up and roll down the slide. For my alerting students, students that need alerting activities, what I love to do is have them climb up, go down, and and then run over to our crash pad and then crash on the pad. And this helps really alert those understimulated students. This is our ever-popular ball pit. Students love the ball pit. And it can be very tricky to get students out of the ball pit. So what we like to do in here is we like to have students walk around the ball pit. I don't know if you've ever tried to walk through a ball pit, but it is not easy. It is very heavy work. So this is great for students who get overstimulated, and you may have to get in here with them and show them how to walk through the ball pit, but it's a wonderful activity to use with students. Here we have a sensory table, and when it is not in use, it is covered by this thick, heavy blanket. And I'm gonna take that blanket off and show you what's inside of our sensory table. Our occupational therapists right now have a lot of colorful play sand, but they do alternate activities and objects that are in here from month to month. So sometimes there will be beans in here, and sometimes there will be rice in here, and students really love this fine motor practice and this tactile activity. This is our squeeze roller, and we like to call it the car wash. We tell our students, "Okay, let's go through the car wash," and students enter through this and then pop out the other end, and what this does is it just provides them with a lot of deep pressure on their body. It's very calming for students. We have a lot of these awesome liquid-filled stepping stones in our sensory room, and these are great for showing students cause and effect. So when I step on this, the liquid inside is going to move. Students love this. We use these a lot for when we do obstacle courses with our sensory room. Here we have our Direct Instruction or therapy table. It's super important to have these in any sensory room so you can work on those cutting goals with students or writing goals with students. And our amazing occupational therapists have taken photos of each activity. Again, visuals are so important, so we are able to utilize our whiteboard using first and then if we need to, and then we have our visual timer here. These tools help us be successful in the sensory room with all of our students. To see more classroom tours as well as tips and tricks on setting up your own special education classroom, like and subscribe to The Autism Helper on YouTube and check out our blog at theautismhelper.com.