💥All About Occupational Therapy

At some point in your child’s school journey, a teacher, school administrator or pediatrician might suggest an OT evaluation. This can happen at any age, but typically we see it more with the younger elementary students. Occupational therapy can be a valuable support that helps to maximize independence and confidence. Typically an Occupational Therapist will conduct a battery of assessments and activities to assess a child’s strengths and challenges. Then they will create a plan for services that includes a series of therapy sessions and goals to be worked on. 

Pediatric Occupational Therapy consists of the following components:

• Activities of Daily Living (ADLs): Developing independence in self-care routines like dressing, bathing, grooming, and feeding.
• Fine Motor Skills: Enhancing hand strength, dexterity, and coordination for tasks like handwriting, cutting, and manipulating small objects.
• Gross Motor & Postural Control: Improving stability, balance, and coordination for physical play and school-based activities like sitting on the rug for classroom instruction.
• Sensory Processing: Helping children regulate their responses to sensory input (e.g., sound, touch, movement) to stay focused and calm.
• Play Skills: Utilizing purposeful play to build cognitive, motor, and social skills in a fun, non-threatening way.
• Visual-Motor Integration: Developing hand-eye coordination for tasks like catching a ball, drawing, and copying from a board.
• Social and Emotional Skills: Fostering interaction with peers, coping mechanisms, and self-regulation.
• Environmental Modifications: Adjusting the home or school environment to support participation, including recommending adaptive equipment like specialized pencils or seating.

Our K-8 teachers recently engaged in some professional development focusing specifically on two of these components, Sensory Processing and Social Emotional Skills, and how to best support them in the classroom. 

Sensory Processing
Humans have one Central Nervous System that takes in information from 8 different senses. You are probably familiar with the first 5 which are visual, olfactory, gustatory (taste), tactile, and auditory. The other 3 are proprioceptive (awareness of the position and movement of the body), vestibular (sense of balance), interoception (ability to feel and interpret internal bodily signals, such as hunger, thirst, heart rate, temperature, pain, and the need for the bathroom).

Some senses are preferences in that we seek them, while others are dysregulators which we try to avoid. If we are not getting enough of a preference, we may seek out stimulation. Consider children who can be on the swing for seemingly endless amounts of time or love to spin. They are seeking that preferred sensory stimulation. We all have a window of tolerance for non-preferred sensations and too many can lead to overwhelm. Both situations can create a barrier to learning because the brain is focused on seeking a preferred sensation or managing the non-preferred ones rather than on the learning.

Emotional Regulation
This is the ability to experience a range of emotion(s) while maintaining control of one’s behaviors. Heavily influenced by sensory input, adults can use strategies such as Zones of Regulation to help children accurately identify what they are feeling and how to move out of a heightened state to a more regulated state.

With collaboration from the family and OT, teachers may utilize several tools in the classroom. Students might take a “movement” break which targets the proprioceptive system by doing heavy work such as rearranging desks, carrying books, or even jumping jacks. Other tools that are ideal for the classroom include resistance bands around the legs of a chair, chewing gum or crunchy snacks, and therapy-grade putty or stress balls. Check-ins between an adult and the child can also help the child to take a moment to assess what their body is feeling and might need. Our teachers are always eager to employ a therapist’s recommendations in order to best support your children.