ARK's Blog

Halloween is genuinely fun, but it can also be genuinely overwhelming and ripe for sensory overload. It's not only a lot of input, but also a lot of input all at once. Halloween stacks nearly every kind of sensory input into one evening. Potentially scratchy / uncomfortable / new costumes to wear. Face paint on the skin. Motion-activated screaming skeletons. Dark streets. Flashing porch lights. Cr …

Halloween is a fun time of year, with tons of ways to make oral motor therapy more engaging with seasonal ideas. Here are 20 ways to add a spooky twist to practicing lip, tongue, jaw, and breath skills. One thing before starting: food-based activities depend entirely on the individual. Allergies, the textures they tolerate, and their current chewing and swallowing skills all matter, so please keep …

A school day asks a lot of a body. Sit still, stay quiet, track a voice at the front of the room, tune out twenty-two other people doing twenty-two other things, then get up, move through a loud hallway, and do it again. For plenty of students that's manageable. For plenty of others it takes real effort to hold together, and the effort has to go somewhere. . . That's usually what you're seeing …

Fingernails. The inside of your cheek. A pen cap. A plastic water bottle cap. If you've spent a lot of your life reaching for something to bite or chew, you've probably heard it called an oral fixation - it's a familiar phrase, even if you've never used it yourself. What most people don't know is that there's a whole category of tools built specifically for an oral fixation in chewing. We often ca …