Spring Theme And Activity Ideas

Spring is HERE!

At last, the winter thaw is starting! The birds are chirping, the sun peeps out a little more each day and the grass grows a little greener. If you’re like us it probably felt like winter seemed like it would never end and cabin fever spread through the house like the common cold. Spring is such a wonderful time of year and the perfect opportunity to catch that teachable moment with your little one. Spring can also be a difficult time for a young child on the spectrum. The weather changes, the sunlight is much brighter, the birds are chirping, and our clothing changes on a daily basis!

Last Spring, Ewan had a particularly hard time with those happy little birds outside his window that just popped up out of nowhere one fine spring morning. He absolutely wouldn’t allow us to open the windows and air out the house. That’s when we decided to tackle the whole idea of spring and teach him what gets those birds chirping. So here’s our list of fun activities and themes to get you marching into spring!

The Welcome Series Books on How Things Are Made:

This family couldn’t live without some of these fabulous books. Sometimes hard to get, but always worth the wait are books like From Caterpillar to Moth, From Egg to Robin, and From Trees to Paper, From Acorn to Oak Tree, From Tadpole to Frog, and From Seed to Dandelion. These books are perfect for the little mind that like things to be orderly and sequential, perfect for many of our ASD children. These books often just make sense to the literal kid whose cup of tea does not extend to fairy tales. These books have wonderfully detailed real photographs and short sentences to go with each photograph—perfect for a quick story and perfect for the emerging reader. At the end of each book is a New Words section that is great for building vocabulary and is great to use for children who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems. Plus, there’s a To Find Out More section at the end that includes ideas for books and websites about the subject.

There are also similar books that delve into these topics by Scholastic and National Geographic Publishers. Scholastic has their Time To Discover series that includes Grub to Ladybug, Caterpillar to Butterfly (incredibly worn in our house from being read so much!), Seed to Plant, Tadpole to Frog, Egg to Robin, and many, many others. I love this series because of the great photographs that go with each topic and that each topic covers some wonderfully basic concepts like weather and where animals live. All great topics for springtime. I also like the following books by Scholastic: Light, Wind, Water, Science Outside, Animal Feet, Scientists, and Who Lives in a Tree? National Geographic has a similar series called Rookie Read About Science and includes books like All Along the River, All the Colors of the Rainbow, Can You See the Wind, and Chicken or the Egg? Now, these books are geared for children who are beginning readers, but don’t count these out as great stories to read to your young child. As I’ve said before, many ASD children get more out books like these and are more attentive to these types of books than they are about abstract concepts and stories. Go with what your child is interested in and play off those strengths. Plus, when they get older, they’ve got great independent reading books to use! Find all these books and more at my Amazon store here.

Nature Walks

My kids and I love the nature walks. First, it gets my very active boys out on the pavement to bounce that energy right out of them. Second, it’s a chance for them to see first hand all the things we read about in the books I mentioned above. It’s not enough to read about these concepts or watch a video; you gotta get your hands dirty. We go looking for things like acorns, pinecones, feathers, insects, cocoons, and animals. We look for animal footprints and try to guess what animal or even if we think it’s a big or small animal.

Big sister goes along too and shows the boys things that she enjoys like flowers and colors. We always come home with a large assortment of ‘nature’ material and often the kids will make a collage out of it on a piece of paper or glue it to the inside of a shoebox (all big sister’s ideas!).

*Take a magnifying glass with you on your trip—some things just need to be enlarged! Take a pair of binoculars, or a handy telescope / seascope like the one we have from Hearthsong. Look under things, under rocks or underwater.

*Take pictures along your walk and use those in getting your child to retell the story either in words or in sequencing the photographs. Make a scrapbook for your child to take to their grandparent, teacher, or therapist—if your child can’t speak yet, write in some little phrases here and there so the communication partner can make connections without you having to jump in and explain.

Prisms

I remember in my college chemistry class getting to experiment with prisms and colors and making a spectrometer in our lab. My daughter was about 4 then and thought it was the coolest toy ever when I brought it home. Ok, we’re a bunch of nerds but so what. Prisms are fun to hang on your window or even make your own homemade spectrometer out of a cereal box and a Compact Disc. If you’re talking about rainbows or colors what better way to ‘see’ the light than with a fun little experiment like that. Colors don’t just come from Crayola folks. If you have older children have them make the project and then get your littler ones to see the results. How cool is it to know that rainbows aren’t the only way to see the full spectrum of colors in light. The sun seems white folks but it’s actually made up of all the colors. Prisms and sun catchers and even homemade spectrometers teach your kids about light and that can lead into experiments with different kinds of light—flashlights, campfires, light bulbs, moonlight, and even lightning. Take the kid who flicks the light switch off and on a hundred times a minute and make a connection for him or her, take that kid to Home Depot and see all the light switches!

Growing

Things that grow are really a topic that can go into just about anything. If you’ve got your kiddo with feeding problems, here’s a way to bring home the idea that food doesn’t just come from the grocery store. Food grows. Animals grow. People grow. See a trend here? Some kids can really get into this kind of thing and almost need to know how things work before they can handle even the simplest concept of eating foods. Everyone takes the concept of eating for granted, that is, until you have a child who doesn’t do it well or for some who can’t eat like others.

*Food is nourishment for people, animals, insects, or plants and children need to see this whole breadth of what it takes to grow food and then get it to the table. So go to the store and spend $1.00 on some seeds and get planting. You don’t need a yard to plant some huge garden, sometimes all it takes it a pot or a test tube to show your child how things grow.

*I also like the products from Steve Spangler Science that grow by absorption. The test tube alligator is too cool and something Ewan dragged around with him for weeks. Sponges work too and the simple toys at the dollar store that grow into shapes or animals with a bowl of water.

Weather

Weather is a big deal if you live where we do—the Midwest. The saying goes, if you don’t like the weather stick around a few minutes, it’ll change. Sunny, rainy, windy, foggy, and heck, the occasional snowstorm in spring can really get your young child on the spectrum all worked up.

*First, there’s the clothing to deal with. It always starts out cold and gets warmer through the day so what you left the house in at 7am doesn’t work so well by noon. Preparing your little guy or gal for changes in the weather can be hard, especially if it can all happen in an 8 hour period! Explain and label all the kinds of clothing we can wear in the spring and how we often have to dress warmer in the morning and can shed some clothes as the day goes on. Practice by playing with your suitcase and pretending to pack for a trip and play games that require you to find all your special spring clothes and put them on as fast as you can!

*Talk about the weather, read books about the weather, and play with weather concepts to understand something like air (I recommend the Airzooka from Spangler Science!) or make your own fog with some simple kitchen items.

Earth Day is April 22!

Don’t forget about a wonderful opportunity that comes once a year to talk about Mother Nature and this big blue planet. Earth Day is great for your older kids but don’t count out those little ones. This is great for your little scientist who knows all about the planets, or even your child that just wants to play catch with your blow up planets. The great thing about Earth Day is just getting outside.

*Ride your bikes to where you’re going—use a bike trailer if you have little ones who don’t ride yet. For those who want to use a tricycle but can’t peddle yet, Kettler makes tricycles that come with a push bar that lets mom or dad do all the work.

*Take a nature walk but on your way help pick up litter and explain why. Plant some flowers or trees and get dirty.

*Read some books about the Earth, trees (like Trees to Paper), do some coloring activities, roll playdough into planets.

*Divide your trash up into different sections for a week (or maybe more!) and help your child classify glass, plastic, paper, and where to put them. Talk about how different things are, or how they are made, classify all the colors and shapes you see.

*Go outside and watch the clouds. Make your own clouds with cotton balls and marshmallows.

*Just go outside and run around in circles—I know quite a few auties who’d have fun with that one.

Camping

Ok, before anyone freaks out and says there’s no way I could take my young child out to the woods and camp—I’m suggesting you can always ‘camp out’ in your living room. There are tons of tents for kids out there that practically pop out of the bag ready to go. Our boys put the tent up in the bedroom last week and ‘camped out’ all night on the bedroom floor. For the kid who can’t handle that much transition, start out with a few minutes at a time and put the tent away. You’ll probably find thought that your ASD child likes the tent as a way to de-stress and hide out for a bit and you just may end up integrating that into a sensory corner!

*Get one of those toy campfires like the Hershey’s Smores Maker and break out the marshmallows. Turn out the lights and use your flashlights and have story time in the tent. Make a map and find your tent or just do what my boys do and run in and out of the tent a thousand times until you’re out of breath! Make it fun and draw your more hesitant child in with as many of their favorite toys or things as possible.

*Listen to animal sounds and get one of those cool ambient nature sounds CD and make it realistic! Guess which animals are making the noises, frogs, birds, wolves, etc…

Websites

My favorite website lately have been Enchanted Learning and Kidssoup and both websites offer printables including mini-books, word wall words, activities, pre-writing worksheets, and coloring sheets. Crayola also has some fun printables and craft activities and great spring ideas. Just doing a Google search for Spring Printables should bring up quite a bit of stuff. Diane Flynn Keith offers a daily email called Clickschooling that sends BRILLIANT ideas and links to websites that are often related to the time of year or special topics. Enchanted Learning and Kidssoup are both sites that require a fee, but it’s pretty small (20 bucks per year) for what you get out of the deal. DLTK’s website has tons of free printables and Family Fun has Printapalooza (i.e. lots of printables) and don’t forget about your child’s favorite TV show’s website, like Nick Jr., Disney, Noggin, and PBS.

Farms

Spring time is when the baby animals come so get thee to a farm. Talk about babies, animals, farms, and then go to one! Get your plastic animals and take them with you. Read all about farms, farmers, machines, and go see a working farm. This is a great way to see animals in action and to see where food comes from besides the store.

Spring and the Senses

Consider the classic Pat the Bunny book many of us grew up with. These books are always out when it gets close to Easter and really this type of touch and feel book is quite popular nowadays. What better way to get accustomed to a new season than to use your senses to understand it!

*Bunnies and chicks are soft, grass is prickly, leaves are new and smooth, bark is rough, and water is cold. When you go on that nature walk, feel your way through the walk; get books that allow your child to experiment with the feel of this season or the Easter holiday. Do a little matching game with fluffy chicks (made from cotton balls) and rough bark that you collected on your walk.

*Spring also smells folks, and some don’t care for it! Think of the poor allergy sufferer who sneezes his or her way through a nice nature walk! Flowers and trees are blooming left and right and seeds or pollen fill the air. Sometimes that’s a bit overwhelming, try experimenting with walking outside in different times of the day—some are better than others. Try labeling the smells around you, that’s cut grass or that’s a lilac tree and for your child that’s not speaking use symbols and photographs so they can connect the smell with a thing and may be able to show you which ones they DON’T like. That way, you can avoid planting that lilac bush under your child’s bedroom window!

* If you have a little one that is a bit on the defensive side when it comes to sounds, try experimenting with recording birds or frogs or insects and play guessing games. Match pictures to the sounds when you hear them. Label, label, label. Make use of symbols and photographs to get your child to recognize the symbol goes with someone, label the sound also not just the thing. For example: cows say moo, label the cow and moo. There are lots of books available around Easter that let your child record a sound themselves and play it back, and there are ones for animal sounds. Respect the fact that having the windows open may just be too much for the kid with supersonic hearing—birds chirping to us may be no big deal but may just be painful for the child who is sensitive in the hearing department.

Easter

Easter can be just as confusing for young children on the spectrum as Christmas is. Easter is filled with bunnies that produce eggs, eggs that are left out in the yard by a giant bunny that comes when nobody is looking, and Easter is often filled with tons of foods that many of our ASD kids just can’t handle—especially all on the same table at once!

*Try to break down all your family’s Easter traditions a week or so before Easter or before you start putting up the decorations. Talk about the Easter bunny and looking for eggs and how to behave during an Easter egg hunt. Do a few ‘dry runs’ and practice an egg hunt before the big one.

*Talk to your family members about what’s in the Easter basket as some go overboard with chocolate and candy and as a family with a new food allergy kid (eosinophilic esophagitis) everybody needs reminders about what kids can and can’t have for treats. Think about going without candy and fill the baskets with toys and books instead.

*Decorating eggs is fun and a great tradition in most families but some hands aren’t made for delicate eggs and some noses aren’t made for the vinegar bath the eggs go in or the smell of hard boiled eggs. Try something a little more tolerable but still a sensory experience—take a roll of cheap tape and let your little one unroll the heck right out of the tape and let it make a big pile. Shape the pile of tape into what an egg looks like and roll it in shredded colored construction paper. This idea came straight from Mr. Ewan. He unrolled a whole thing of tape, squished it together and said, “Look mom it’s a brain!” Now that’s cool.

March.20.2007. - This Child Is Smart