St.Jude Therapy Center

SJTC PLAYGROUP SESSIONS ✨

Exploring rough vs. smooth, hard vs. soft. So much learning in one learning potato! 🥔🔍

Cutting and peeling potatoes is an excellent, low-pressure activity for children with clear benefits across sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional, and daily living skills. 🌈

Benefits:

🧩 Sensory Processing

- Touch: Feels rough skin, smooth flesh, firmness, moisture, and slight stickiness — great for desensitization, tactile tolerance, and calming over-responsive systems.
- Smell: Mild, familiar aroma; less overwhelming than strong foods, builds olfactory awareness.
- Sight: Color, shape, size, changes when peeled/cut; supports visual discrimination and focus.
- Proprioception: Firm pressure, gripping, pulling, and cutting gives deep muscle input — very regulating, reduces restlessness or anxiety.

✋ Fine & Gross Motor Skills

- Peeling: Grip strength, wrist rotation, hand-eye coordination, bilateral coordination (holding potato + moving peeler).
- Cutting: Controlled force, precision, finger isolation, stability; use plastic knives or safe cutters first.
- Hand strength: Builds dexterity needed for writing, dressing, zippers, buttons, and self-care.
- Arm/shoulder work: Heavy work input that calms and organizes the body.

🧠 Cognitive & Learning

- Sequencing: Step-by-step: wash → peel → cut → sort teaches order, routine, and following instructions.
- Cause & effect: “If I peel here, skin comes off; if I cut this way, shape changes”.
- Math basics: Count pieces, sort by size/shape, compare weight/quantity.
- Focus & attention: Repetitive, predictable, goal-oriented — easy to sustain attention, builds concentration span.
- Problem-solving: Adjusting grip, finding best way to peel/cut, adapting if potato is awkward.

Every peel and cut builds confidence and focus 🥔👐
Simple tasks, powerful impact. 😇


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A Glimpse of child’s Speech and Language Development

Before the child has limited vocabulary and unable to speak multiple words, he also gets frustrated with the activity given especially when it comes to speaking. But with the help of verbal behavior approach of teaching the child can now do the following;

• Echoic “Baba”, “Eat”, “Daddy” – The purpose of this activity is strengthening early echoic skills, increase functional output and expand the learner’s expressive vocabulary. These foundational echoic responses support the later development of mands and tacts, particularly for socially significant and motivating words.
• Tacting (Labeling) – The purpose of Tacting is to build the expressive language it helps the child say what they see, hear, or experience, not just respond to questions or request. Tacting also increase awareness of the environment, the child learns to notice and identify things around them, which supports learning in daily life. It can also expand vocabulary by growing the child’s word bank (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.), which is needed to conversation and lastly it improve social interaction. Tacting allows the child to share experiences (e.g “Look! Dog!”), which is important for social conversation.




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Enhancing Proprioceptive Skills

The purpose of this activity is to help the child develop important skills such as;

Improve Gross Motor Skills – The child uses their arms, legs, and body to reach and stay balanced. The resistance from the hanging object helps the child understand how their body moves and applies force.

Enhance Coordination – It trains the child to coordinate eyes, hands and body movements.
Increase attention and focus – The child needs to concentrate on the task (reaching, grabbing, or hitting the target).

Build strength and endurance – Helps strengthen muscles, especially in the arms and core.

Promote following instructions – The child learns to listen and complete a structured task.

Support sensory regulation – The activity can help calm or organize the child’s sensory system.





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