“For children with learning disabilities, the classroom based physical therapy and occupational therapy should make use of stationery items and readily available materials in the school and children’s homes so that the constructed and designed experiences get linked to cognitive experiences and whole brain development of children,” says Dr Lalit Kishore working as educator-researcher at Disha in Jaipur.
Read the inset collage to learn about the use of stationery items and other readily available material to make the ‘tick-tock toy’ and ‘stapler finger exerciser’ for physical therapy of children with special needs (CWSN).
“It has been found that the conventional cloth-peg activities and jig-saw puzzles, meant normal pre-school children when forced mindlessly on CWSN, distort and damage their fine motor muscles and should be avoided in special schools,” adds Dr Kishore.
He suggests that for CWSN, special educators and special head-teachers must be trained in design thinking skills and ergonomic principles so that they design and construct the experiential activities with readily available materials instead of inflicting children with similarity and uniformity dictated by the markets and their agents.
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