Occupational Therapy
Occupational Therapy Online/ Face to Face.
At Evolve Therapy our occupational therapists can assist with many functional skills that may affect your child’s ability to participate in their daily lives. The following are some areas of how we can help your child.
- Self-care skills
These skills are essential to live independently in daily life. Self-care skills include a child's ability to feed themselves, dressing and grooming, hygiene, toileting and age appropriate chores.
- Executive functioning
Fine motor skills
- These skills are the use of precise and coordinated movements of the fingers and hands. Fine motor skills are necessary for completion of intricate movements which are important to help us day to day. There are many components to fine motor skills these include the ability to manipulate objects within our hands, opposition of all fingers to reach each other and our thumbs and rotation or the wrist. The development of arches in our hands, open thumb web space and finger dexterity are also imperative for fine motor skill abilities.
- Fine motor skills are varied and can be taken for granted until one cannot complete activities. Here are some examples but it is not an exhaustive list: the ability to turn keys, opening any product, pencil grip, opening closing buttons, turning pages on a book, using a phone, picking up intricate items such as clips or money.
Visual perceptual skills
Visual perceptual skills are the brain's ability to make sense of what the eyes see. It is important for everyday activities such as dressing, eating, writing, and playing. Visual perception can be broken into specific target areas, these include:
- Visual Discrimination: This is the ability to notice and compare items that may match or the ability to notice differences e.g. difference between letters, matching shapes or completing jigsaw
- Visual Figure Ground: This is the ability to find something in a busy background e.g. as well as finding items on a busy page or finding a coloured pencil in a pencil case
- Visual Memory: This is the ability to remember something that you saw once it is taken away. An example is remembering the line you read on the board as you look down to copy it down on a page
- Visual Sequencing: This is the ability to distinguish the order of words or letters. writing the notes without reversing any of the letter or words, etc.
- Visual Closure: This is the ability to know what an object is when you can only partially see it e.g is knowing a word or picture when you only see some of it.
- Visual Spatial Awareness: This is the ability to understand where objects are in relation to each other. Examples include personal space awareness and letter spacing.
Bilateral co ordination
- Bilateral co ordinations skills are our ability to use both sides of the body at the same time. Activities that are essential for bilateral coordination include handwriting, feeding, dressing, grooming Without adequate control of this area children may appear clumsy, they may only use one hand or swap hand when completing activities.
Visual motor integration
Visual motor integration is the ability to coordinate the information that your eyes see with movement from other parts of your body. Some examples of skills that require visual motor integration include handwriting, catching and throwing and dressing.
Sensory processing
Sensory processing issues are difficulties with organising and responding to information that comes in through our senses. Some children may be seeking sensory input, others may be avoiding sensory input and some children may not register certain sensory stimuli from the environment. Incorporating sensory strategies into one's daily routine will help children use their sensory systems to discover and explore their preferred environments. This in turn will help develop and improve their gross and fine motor skills, co-ordination and concentration. Imagination, creative thinking, problem solving and experimenting with solutions are also achieved through sensory play.
Handwriting
Handwriting requires a complex link between a number of different components. It requires the person to have good posture, adequate fine motor skills and appropriate visual-motor integration skills. Handwriting also requires a lot of motor planning. The following defines what each area of handwriting means;
- Memory - remembering and writing dictated words
- Orientation - facing letters in the correct direction
- Placement - putting letters on the baseline, under the line and tall letters
- Size - writing too large/small for current age
- Start - where each letter and word begin
- Sequence - order and stroke direction of letter parts
- Control - neatness and proportion for letter parts and words
- Spacing - amount of space left between letters in words and words in sentences