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 …

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 …

If chewing and ADHD seem to go together, you're not imagining it. It's one of the most common things we hear about, whether someone is ordering for their child, a loved one, or for themselves. It can show up in a lot of different ways depending on what's within reach. Wet shirt collars. Flattened pen caps. Hoodie strings, pencil erasers, headphone cords, a game controller with teeth marks on the g …