More than twenty-five years ago, three occupational therapists began designing and using playful activities with the goal of strengthening both motor skills and sensory processing with children who had difficulty successfully participating in school. Given weekly sensorimotor groups, we observed that our children improved their ability to listen, participate, communicate, and successfully carry out these activities with fellow classmates. (Ohl, et al., 2013) With repeated successes, we observed that the children who initially struggled with social interaction and required adult support to participate in the groups were more likely to engage with others and gradually took small but steady steps towards becoming more playful, cooperative, and successful with peers. After sharing our activities with each other, testing them out with our children, and observing positive changes in our children, we decided to share the activities with a wider audience through our first book, Learning in Motion (1998, 2007, 2009).

As years have passed since the initial publication of Learning in Motion, our understanding of young children’s unique needs for support of their growth and development from their parents, grandparents, teachers, and other adults has grown. These children are experiencing an increased negative impact on their development due to changes in their environment, interruptions in their routines from a global pandemic, increased experiences of trauma, and other unavoidable stresses. (Chien, 2022) When we reviewed our original collection of activities, we all agreed that we needed to not only update them and revise the language, we decided to bring on board a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. We invited our colleague to contribute relational strategies for children who need extra support in developing social skills. We wanted to enrich our activities and highlight the benefits to make them user-friendly for adults who are interacting with children. These engaging activities can be an effective tool for use by teachers, parents, grandparents, therapists, social workers, daycare workers, after school program staff, scout leaders, and any caregivers who work with young children. Lastly, we believe our activities are playful, fun, and encourage imagination and creativity, thus Play, Reflect, Connect was born.