Together with your child/young person, hold and feel the cereal box, its shape and size. Shake the box together with your child/young person to listen to the sound and feel the movement of the cereal.
Open the box together, feel the difference between the cardboard box and the internal bag.
Explore the internal bag by squashing, squeezing, shaking, pulling. You can use different body parts to do this such as hands, feet, arms, elbows or legs.
Encourage the young person to open the bag, with support if needed, working together to pull the bag open or using hand under hand support.
To explore the cereal you can support the child/young person to explore with guidance and ideas, or through coactive exploration and hand under hand support.
If the young person does not like to touch use a clear bag, gloves or encourage the child to observe you through vision, sound or through hand under hand support where the child/young person’s hand do not make contact with the cereal directly.
Encourage them to reach inside to feel the size and the shape of the cereal.
Pour some Cheerios, with a shallow tray underneath their hand or on their table tray. Talk about the sounds they hear and smell.
Explore the cereal on the tray or in their hands. Introduce key words/signs through discussion
Are they hard/soft?
Do you like the feel/taste/smell?
Using a rolling pin encourage the young person to bash, roll and squeeze the cereal into crumbs.
Try pouring the sand over their hands an exploring using cups, scoops, tubes, sieves.
Use toys to explore the sand buy pouring, pushing, banging, rolling etc.
To finish
Recall the activity by recounting what you did. Compare the whole cereal to the sand exploring the two different textures/sizes.
Recap what actions and movements you did to make the sand.
Does the child/young person prefer the whole cereal or the sand?
Make sweeping up part of the fun and support the child/young person to help.
