Have you noticed your children becoming fidgety, irritable, lethargic, or just generally inability to control their mood after so much screen time? During COVID-19, screens are inescapable. Unfortunately, too much screen time can be damaging to our mental health by asking us all to focus on images and sounds that are out of our physical environment.

When we as humans, disconnect from our environment we are also disconnecting from our physical body which is confusing to our mind. Cue dysregulation: Dysregulation refers to a decreased ability to manage our emotional responses including sadness, anger, tiredness, and frustration.

To help our children regulate, it is important to give them tools to ground. Grounding in mental health means to bring your focus to what is happening in your body and surroundings. Sensory Kits are individual toolboxes that have items that activate our 5 senses. Activating our 5 senses is a great way to ground ourselves and bring us back into the present moment. They are great to when we are feeling anxious, tired, angry and when we are asked to focus for a long time.

Activity: Build a Sensory Kit

  • A box or container
  • Items that activate 5 senses

Work with your child to build a box or container and fill it with the items for them to use during and after virtual school. Invite them to decorate the box. The box should not include toys that they may want outside of using them as sensory objects.

Here are some ideas:

Smell: Candle, Essential oils that they can rub on wrist and smell to ground, lotion to use the same way, cinnamon sticks, other seasonings they like in a bag.

Taste: Gum, jolly rancher size candy (salivation production is grounding), tea bags or hot chocolate packets, a granola bar

Vision: A picture of a positive memory, flowers on the desk, bubbles to blow, glitter jar (fill a jar with water and glitter to create one that shakes and mixes up.)

Touch: Play dough, fidget toys (pipe cleaners are awesome!), a stone, nail file, feather, small stuffed animal, bag of buttons,

Sound: Nature sound on video/phone, beans in a jar to make a small rain stick, a note to remember to hum or a list of songs (maybe create a play list and if your child hands you tickets from the box you play the playlist), reminder to go outside and listen to the birds,