Since the term “sensory diet” was first coined by Patricia Wilbarger (2002), occupational therapists have been prescribing this intervention, while often struggling with exactly how to implement it. The work of Ayres (1972) informed practitioners of the value of sensory input and its role in guiding adaptive responses. Sensory diets that are built around these principles offer strong opportunities for successful intervention from preschool through high school.
Sensory diets can be highly impactful to a child’s occupational performance in the roles of student, school community member and friend. Performance skills such as fine motor, gross motor, praxis, visual-perceptual, task initiation, focus and attention, and especially self-regulation can all be enhanced by the addition of a sensory diet. Yet it can be hard to put sensory diets into practice.
After this webinar, participants will be better able to plan, prescribe, and implement effective sensory diets using existing resources, to collect data on the effectiveness of sensory diets, to gain support by enlisting parents, teachers, and other stakeholders as collaborators in the process, and most importantly, to foster occupational performance in students across all ages.
Learning Objectives
- Create broadly applicable as well as individualized sensory diet plans with existing resources across preschool to high school. These sensory diet plans will have embedded novelty and will be structured so that trained paraprofessionals can carry out the plans.
- Engage professional and paraprofessional staff in simplified data collection to determine sensory diet effectiveness. This can be part of the evaluation process as well as for determination to continue, alter, or terminate sensory diets.
- Frame language to easily and effectively include sensory diets in IEP documents.
Speaker: Linda Nobles Lannin MS OTR/L, ATP
Earn 1.25 Contact hours
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