Introducing Strings & Things, a suite of sensory stories for young children and people with severe (SLD) or profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). Each story takes you on an adventure led by a magical ball of string, unpacking the lived experience of lockdown and social distancing.

The stories have been created by Julia Collar, director of Collar & Cuffs Co, an inclusive sensory musical theatre company specialising in themes around mental health and emotional development for 0-7s and people with complex needs.

Click the images below to download the stories, and scroll down to find out more about them.

Introducing Strings & Things: Telling the tales of our lives

The Covid-19 Pandemic affects us all without exception. The world as we know it has changed.

It's vital to provide opportunities to explore and understand the impact this has had on us - and we now also need to look forward to what may come next.

We each have our own unique experiences of how Covid-19 has touched our lives. Telling those stories over and over can help our amazing brains process and make sense of them. Working through our experiences, rather than bottling them up, supports good mental health.

Still, not everyone is ready or able to articulate their personal tales yet for many excellent reasons, ranging from the practical to the emotional and beyond. So, sometimes, somebody else's stories can tell or support our own until we're ready to find our own words or expressions.

How sensory stories can help: Inclusive approaches to processing social distancing and lockdown

For those whose interactions and communications with the world are mainly sensory, perhaps due to being very young or having a complex disability, stories require more than words. They need animated narratives that stimulate as many routes of perception and connection as possible.

This is where this suite of sensory stories and Story Massages comes in, and it has been designed to support both the person experiencing the story and the person delivering it.

Many families and settings supporting people with complex disabilities are likely to be shielding for some time to come, and resources can be scarce. With this in mind, these stories have been written to require the simplest of things. Sensory experiences don't need to be elaborate, pretty or expensive to create impact, after all.

A suite of stories

There are five stories, using paired concepts to compare and contrast some common themes within our collective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.

They are not exhaustive, so we hope they may stimulate you to create your own to meet the specific needs of your family member, the person you care for or the person you teach. They are also drama-based with the narrator/facilitator helping to create moments of conversation and character to bring the stories to life.