Finding hard to engage children in activities?
The easiest and fun way to engage autistic children is by providing water activities. These water activities for autistic kids help to build rapport between the child and the therapist or caregiver, it improves social skills, motor skills, and cognitive-perceptual skills and in addition, it satisfies sensory needs.
Now let’s take a look at water activities for autistic kids.
- Sensory Water tub
In a tub add water (to make it attractive add colors to the water), add some seashells, mini toys like fish, octopus, starfish, etc., marbles, and water plants. Every child would love to explore these mini toys by immersing their hands in the water.
Catch fish
Add some floating fish toys in a tub filled with sea blue colored water. Ask the child to catch the fish using a fishing net or a fishing rod.
- Water beads
In a tub pour water and add some water beads into it. Then leave it undisturbed for some time. The water beads soaked in water will turn into smooth and jelly-like mini balls. Now hide some mini characters inside and then ask the child to find each character.
- Sorting water beads
Add randomly colored soaked water beads in a basket and then ask the child to sort the beads by colors.
- Wash off foam
Tub 1: Mix soap or shampoo in water and create foam. Then add some shape sorter toys to it.
Tub 2: Fill with luke-warm water, Then ask the child to find a particular shape from tub 1 and wash off the foam using water from tub 2.
- Walk inside water
This is a very simple activity that can be safely implemented in an inflatable water pool. Then simply ask the child to transfer objects from one end to another. For example, Stacking rings, playing shape, alphabet, number concept board, etc.
- Squeeze pom-pom
In a bowl add pom-poms and water, let it soak for a few mins so that the pom-poms will absorb the water.
Now ask the child to take each pom-pom and squeeze the absorbed water into another bowl.
- Ball throw and catch
Fill an inflated pool with water (half level) and, then ask the child to sit inside the pool (assure safety) and play a ball throw and catch game.
- Kick the ball
The inflated pool can be filled with water to ¼ level. A goalpost is set at one end and from the other end, then the child is asked to kick the ball to reach the goalpost.
- Pour water
Provide the child with five test tubes each filled with a few drops of concentrated colored ink. Using another test tube containing plain water, ask the child to fill the five coloured test tubes with water to a certain level marked with a marker.
