Occupational Therapy Services
What is Occupational Therapy?
Occupational therapy (also known as OT) addresses issues related to a child's participation in daily activities or routines. The term "occupation" relates to what occupies a child's time. In OT services we use a child's primary occupation of play in order to address limitations in any of the following areas:
Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills are a child's ability to control the small movements of the hands and fingers. As fine motor skills develop, they allow children to participate in daily activities including play, self-care, and academic tasks. Delayed development of fine motor skills can contribute to difficulties such as poor handwriting, weak grasp on utensils, poor ability to manipulate clothing fasteners or small toys like legos, as well as poor control over a pencil to perform tasks like coloring in the lines, connecting dots, drawing, or writing.
Social Interaction Skills
Social interaction skills are the skills children use everyday in order to interact and communicate with others. They include verbal and non-verbal communication, such as speech, gestures, facial expressions and body language. Difficulties with social interaction skills can lead to a child struggling to make or sustain friendships and resolve conflict with peers. They may have difficulties tolerating losing a game or not getting to do things "their way." These difficulties result in children being unable to have positive experiences when interacting with others.
Sensory Processing Skills
Sensory processing refers to the way the nervous system receives messages from the senses and turns them into responses. For those with sensory processing differences, sensory information goes into the brain but does not get organized into appropriate motor or behavioral responses. Poor sensory processing skills may contribute to a child being overly sensitive to certain types of sensory input, a child craving and seeking out intense amounts of sensory input, poor motor coordination, or poor attention/direction following skills.
Self Care Skills
Self care skills are the everyday tasks that children perform in order to be ready to participate in daily life activities. This includes tasks such as dressing, grooming, bathing, eating, and sleeping. These types of tasks are often referred to as the activities of daily living (ADL’s). Self care skills are important to address as they lead to increased independence for children as well as help them build important skills such as learning how to plan, sequence, and organize tasks throughout the lifespan.
Visual Perceptual Skills
Visual perceptual skills help a child make sense of and interpret what their eyes are seeing. Visual perceptual skills are very important for participation in age appropriate cognitive and academic tasks. Poor visual perceptual skills may contribute to difficulties such as inability to complete puzzles, difficulty copying text from the board, inability to identify letters/numbers/shapes, and difficulty finding items in busy environments.
Motor Coordination Skills
Motor coordination refers to whether a child can get their arms and legs to work together in a coordinated, effective way. Many tasks that require coordinated movement also require the child to have good motor planning skills in order to time their movements accurately. Poor motor coordination skills may contribute to a child's difficulty learning new motor skills such as learning to swim, ride a bike, tie their shoes, or participate in sporting activities.