Early development

A birthday sensory story

Primary

Communication and language

﻿Hello, my name is Kate and I am very excited to be your teacher today. We are going to read a story all about a birthday party. For this lesson you will need some tissue paper, bubbles, balloons, a blanket, a noisy toy, some shaving foam and a cupcake case. Press pause as you get things ready. Let's get ready. Find a quiet comfortable space away from distractions. Gather your resources and have them nearby and make sure that you and your learner are comfortable. Press pause once you get everything ready. It's time to look, listen and learn. Are you ready to read a story? The first time, I'll read through with some hints and tricks things to try it with your learner. The second time, I read through with minimal adult language for you to enjoy the story with your child. Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Lucy. Lucy loved birthday parties. Lucy loved to play all sorts of games. First, she liked to play pass the parcel. Now, I've just made a really simple pass the parcel with two layers of tissue paper and a small surprise inside, which could be suited to your learner depending on what they enjoy. I've just put some bubbles in here today because many, many of our learners enjoy bubbles. So this is a great activity for building up anticipation and for building up realisation, which are really important engagement skills. So what you can do, is you can start off the activity modelling how to open it, have your time first and then pass it on to the learner self. I would share lots of excitement, lots of anticipation yourself, modelling based skills you want to see coming up. Today I have a first layer, baby, be able to get the anticipation with your body language, with your facial expressions and with your language. Then you want to pass it to the learner. Perhaps they might need some assistance in opening it, perhaps you want to help them hand over hand. Perhaps they will be able to open it themselves. Again you want that realisation that it's their turn then it's your turn. And you want the anticipation of oh what's going to be inside. Then you get to the next layer, you can put as many layers as you want depending on how long you think you're learner will pay attention to the tail. How long you think you can spread it out and then its like aah, what's inside bubbles. And what you want you to do is you then want to enjoy the activity, with the learner to reward all of these wonderful anticipation and realisation skills that they've shown you. Then she loved to play bounce the balloon. So for this activity, you want to have your ballon already blown up. And the game is just to try and keep the balloon off the ground with your learner. Now there's lots of different things that you can do with that activity. You could simply be exploring the balloon, listening to it, touching it. You could put rice inside it to make it more of an experience. And you really want to be looking for those exploration skills with the ballon. And the other thing that you could do is build a game out of it. So you're looking for persistence, that trying to reach for the ballon, trying to grab the balloon. Perhaps if your learner has more restricted physical movement, you might be able to play the game, just with little hand movement, little foot movement, which you can then show big response to and obviously the ballon will move to even a small movement, which is ideal. With a learner who's maybe more physically able, you might be throwing the balloon, you might want to extend the game by hiding the balloon, see if they can share some initiation to come and look for the balloon. And you want to be modelling with your body language and facial expressions. How exciting the ballon is, how fun the game is to keep off the floor. And you can keep this going as long as your learner is interested. You can pause the PowerPoint and just play with it for as long as you like to keep that engagement going. She really liked making balloon rockets and letting them fly all over the place. This activity is really grateful, realisation and anticipation. So what we want to do, is we want to get the balloon and blow it up and again, you can make an exciting, dramatic moment out of this. And then what we want to do is, we want to hold it again. This is something you could model initially for your learner and then pass over to them. So they know what the expectation is and they're comfortable with what you're asking them to do. And then you get to go one, two, three, And let it blow away. So this is a really great one to learn with all kinds of different learners. If you have learners with restricted physical movements, I find that it could be really great just to tuck it in between two fingers or maybe if you have a tightly curved hand, you tuck it in there and then only the slightest movement is needed for them to release the balloon. But they are then in control of it and they're getting that cause and effect and that realisation that it's them, that's causing the balloon to go off. And you can also build loads of anticipation into this activity. You know, you blow the balloon really big. So you know that it's going to fly really far and then you do a big countdown, three, two, one, perhaps you could even build in some vocalisations from your learners. So when they vocalise or when they say go, you could then let go of the balloon or help them to let go of the ballon. So that again, they're getting that realisation that they're causing the excitement of the balloon. And don't feel like you have to use lots of language in this activity, it's very visual and it's very exciting on its own. So sign language sometimes can detract from the activity. So it can all be non verbal, you could blow the balloon up, then just use the words three, two, one and watched the brain go together to model what your expectation is. She always played hide and seek. Hide and seek is a wonderfully engaging activity and game, which is really simple and requires very minimal equipment. So all you need is a blanket. Again, like with the other activities, I would initially model it first. And so all you would do is hide behind the blanket and then big reveal. And again, minimal language all about the body language, the facial expressions, the excitement that you're getting up the activity to help engage the people. And then what you want to do, is you want to pass over the activity to the learner, see the extent to which they can lead it. Perhaps if it's a learner with restricted physical movements, you might want to put the blanket in their hands so that any movement they have, you can sort of help them bring the blanket down off their face. If it's a more ambulant learner, you might want to let them do it themselves. And what you're doing is your building that anticipation, you're waiting for them to pull the blanket down so that you can make a big fuss and a big excitement over them doing it. So they want to do it again and again that's building up that realisation of I'm in charge of this activity, when I pull the blanket down, I get this wonderful reaction. So it's building that ownership that cause an effect on understanding. So it's also great for initiation because it's within, it's all in their control, it's up to them when they pull the blanket off or if they do pull the blanket off or if they leave it on to be cheeky. And it's just a really nice, simple activity that has so many different layers. So it's worth giving it some time and exploring it with the learner. Again, pausing the PowerPoint. Don't feel pressure to move on to the next thing, because lots of lends really enjoyed this activity and then might want to spend a bit longer on it so that they can really go through those skills so that they can really practise that realisation and that initiation. So give them that as much time as you think that that guarantee enjoy your full. And she always won at musical statues. So again, musical statues is a really fun, simple game for you to enjoy with your learner. The first thing I would do is create a musical instrument or noisy toy of some kind. And perhaps you have a tambourine, a guitar, a drum or something like that on the house. If you don't, it's fine. I've just found an old tin filled with some dry lentils. which makes a great rattle. Obviously, be careful that the lid doesn't come off and there's nothing that could go in in the mouth or that there's no choking hazards involved. And then what you do is you want to just pass on the ownership of the activity. So once you've shown them how to use it. I would have a little dance and pass it over to them. And each time they make the noise, you as the cause and effect toy here, you get to fun here and then when they stop, you're going to stop. I'm going to make noise and I'm going to stop Now this is a lovely, lovely activity for exploration. They're exploring that cause and effect, they're we're exploring that, they're in control of your actions, which many, many learners are going to find really funny and really entertaining. And they're also practising the realisation, they're realising that when they do this, they get that response from you, which is exciting. It's very empowering for them and again, it's that cause and effect is that realisation and that exploration, which are really important skills for learning. So the funnier and the bigger the dumb thing, the better just to really reinforce that, that cause and effect and that response. But most of all, she liked to eat cupcakes. Now this next activity can get a little bit messy. So if you would like to put a nap on your learner and on yourself, that's absolutely fine. What we're going to do is we're going to make a shaving foam cupcake. So you need to cupcake case, you need some shaving foam. Give it a shake and again something you do with the learner, you don't have to have a prepared, the whole activity. You can build anticipation, you can build up excitement and then you just can make a little, give it a little shake and little cupcake there of shaving foam. Then this is where the fun begins. We get a splat your shaving foam after a countdown, you can do this at hands a lots of learners will love to just do it with their hands because they'll love to feel the texture and explore the texture of the shaving foam. Or if you have a learner who is perhaps a bit more tactile defensive or would rather have a spoon and he could use a spoon. So what we're going to do is we're going to build up that anticipation, get going to build it, that excitement. I'm going to go three, two, one and splash. And you splash it everywhere. So this activity is really great for just building up moment of enjoyment and engagement and persistence. Perhaps they're going to have to have a few goes to splat it properly. Perhaps they just do little movements if they're restricted in their mobility. But again, that's a case of big excitement and big responses to all of their attempts a splash of the cupcake. And it's about manner initiation. It's about them initiating the splats and then having that visual tactile reward. And once you've done it, you can give them lots of time to explore the shaving foam, to explore the splat. You can repeat the activity, you can just reshape it and do it again. It's a really good activity for early numbers. You can do one, two, three cupcakes and you can splat all three of the cupcakes. Again, you could use that vocalisation from the learner of three, two, one and wait for them to initiate. Wait for them to give you a vocalisation before you splat or before they splat the cupcake. And it's all about finishing on really fun, messy so that they want to come back to the next lesson because they remember how exciting it was. Now I'm going to read through the story with minimal adult language, just for you to enjoy and put in place all of the activities and resources that we've discussed. Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Lucy. Lucy loved birthday parties. Lucy left to play all sorts of games. First, she liked to play, pass the parcel. Then she loved to play bounce the balloon. She really liked making balloon rockets and letting them fly all over the place. She always played hide and seek and she always won at musical statues. But most of all, she liked to eat cupcakes. To make this story easier, minimise the language you're using with each slide and use key words instead. Spend longer on each activity to allow the learner to engage and explore on their own terms. To make it harder, repeat the story a few times and see if the learning can predict what's going to happen next. Show them any of the images and slides and see if they can lead the activity themselves. There are lots of party related ideas to try. Why not decorate a party hat, make your own streamer or make some real cupcakes to try. If you'd like to, please ask your parents or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, tagging "@OakNational" and "#LearnwithOak".

A birthday sensory story

A birthday sensory story

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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