Shaving cream play is a great motivating activity to assist with concentration and sustained attention, and it’s just fun!

Five benefits of using shaving cream as part of your child’s Occupational Therapy home program:

  1. Shaving cream is a great medium for practicing pre-writing patterns. Pre-writing patterns include waves, hills, crocodile’s teeth and pigs tails.  Mastering pre-writing patterns is the precursor to developing great handwriting. These shapes form the foundation of our letters so children need to be able to to these patterns smoothly and effortlessly if they are to develop legible handwriting.
  2. Shaving cream is also a great medium for practicing letter formation. Writing the same letter over and over in an exercise book is boring compared to drawing it in shaving cream.
  3. Messy play, such as playing in shaving cream, can help to reduce tactile sensitivity in children who are bothered by light touch. These children typically are quite “stand-offish” with messy play or will only participate in it by using their fingertips rather than getting their whole hand dirty. You need to respect the child’s tactile defensiveness. When they have had enough, let them wash their hands rather than push them to play for a bit longer. For children who really avoid immersing their hands in the shaving cream, let them push a matchbox car or other favourite toy through it. The car can “drive around the letter track”. Before you know it, they will probably have some shaving cream on their fingers and tolerate it for a few minutes before needing to wipe it off.
  4. Shaving cream is great for motivating reluctant writers to have a go at improving their letter formation. Children who refuse to hold a pencil or who hate sitting at the table for any length of time, will often have a go at shaving cream and find that time flies when they are having fun.
  5. Shaving cream is good “messy” fun for the whole family. You can easily set siblings up with their own pile of shaving cream to keep them busy while you help the other child with their visual motor, fine motor or handwriting activities.

source – http://www.occumax.com.au/five-benefits-of-shaving-cream-for-occupational-therapy-home-programs/