Tips for Adapted Toys
Playing with your toy
1.
Let your child decide if it's fun, and explore the toy at his or her own pace.
Sure, you're excited; your kid is driving a truck around the living room!
But your child needs to understand that he or she is in control and figure out how
the thing works.
2. If you (or other
typically-developing children) play with the toy in front of your
disabled child, ALWAYS play with it using the switches. Kids with
disabilities don't want to be different; if big sister plays with the
unadapted controller, they want to play with it too. And presumably they
won't be successful doing that, or you wouldn't have bothered to adapt
the toy in the first place.
Adapting your own toys
If you have the skills, adapting toys yourself will save you some money and let you choose which toys to adapt. If you don't have the skills, be warned that you could destroy your toy or possibly hurt yourself.
Here are some things we do when we adapt toys, and a video showing how we adapt our RC boat.
1. Find a toy that's fun! If you're thinking you'll play with it after your child has gone to bed, that's a good sign.
Here are some things we do when we adapt toys, and a video showing how we adapt our RC boat.
1. Find a toy that's fun! If you're thinking you'll play with it after your child has gone to bed, that's a good sign.
2. Choose a toy that's switch-adaptable. Make sure that what's fun can be accessed by closing a single switch.
3.
If you're going to adapt the toy yourself, make sure you're comfortable
disassembling and reassembling the toy. It can be harder than it looks;
we've purchased toys that we decided were just too much trouble.
4.
Make sure there's room in the toy to accommodate whatever you're going
to add to it. We can say from experience that it's annoying to be unable
to reassemble a toy with the extra wires or plugs inside.
5.
Test the toy thoroughly BEFORE you modify it. We have a really cool
fire engine that could drive forward and backward and move its ladder,
but we discovered after adding six switch ports to it that the steering
didn't work. Stores won't take returns of toys after you drill holes in
them.
6. Think twice before using remote-controlled toys that use
infrared light (IR) for the control. These controllers need to be
pointed at the toy to work, and that's difficult when you're using
switches instead. This is an issue with the RC fish that we carry, but we just couldn't pass up the opportunity to switch-adapt those.
Here are videos showing how we adapt our toys:
Here are videos showing how we adapt our toys:
Kid Galaxy Dune Buggy (Good Background for Fire Truck, too)
Kid Galaxy Fire Truck or Ford F-150
Kid Galaxy Big Wheelie Cycle
RC Boat