| Our Occupational Therapists can help your child with:
Occupational Therapy
Pediatric occupational therapy focuses on a child’s sensory and motor skills, emotional development, self-care abilities and play skills to help improve successful functioning in the home, at school and in the community.
Occupational therapy is an important service for children with a variety of conditions, including premature birth, congenital anomalies, neurological disorders, sensory processing difficulties, challenging behavior, neuromuscular disease, prenatal drug exposure, and autism spectrum disorders.
Occupational therapy may help children to:
- Promote age-appropriate mobility and motor skills
- Facilitate developmental skills and play behaviors
- Improve feeding and oral skills
- Improve visual motor coordination
- Improve sensory processing skills
- Improve fine motor skills
- Improve behavioral state, organization and self-regulation
- Promote independence in daily living skills
- Provide environmental adaptations and/or adaptive equipment to enable increased independence
Speech/Language
Speech language therapy involves the assessment and treatment of difficulties relating to verbal and non verbal communication, including augmentative communication.
The Language in speech language pathology is made up rules that include the following:
- What words mean (e.g., "star" can refer to a bright object in the night sky or a celebrity)
- How to make new words (e.g., friend, friendly, unfriendly)
- How to put words together (e.g., "Peg walked to the new store" rather than "Peg walk store new")
- What word combinations are best in what situations ("Would you mind moving your foot?" could quickly change to "Get off my foot, please!" if the first request did not produce results)
The Speech in speech language pathology is the verbal means of communicating. Speech consists of the following:
- Articulation: How speech sounds are made (e.g., children must learn how to produce the "r" sound in order to say "rabbit" instead of "wabbit").
- Voice: Use of the vocal folds and breathing to produce sound (e.g., the voice can be abused from overuse or misuse and can lead to hoarseness or loss of voice).
- Fluency: The rhythm of speech (e.g., hesitations or stuttering can affect fluency).
Speech therapy also addresses feeding and swallowing difficulites. Speech therapy can help children improve the following skills:
- oral motor strength and awareness
- articulation (forming and producting sounds correctly)
- stuttering/fluency
- expressive language (formulating thoughts, ideas, questions, answers)
- receptive language (understanding spoken language)
- pragmatic language (social skills)
- phonological awareness (an important pre-reading skill)
Co-treatment Services
This is a session in which a speech therapist and an occupational therapist will work together to treat one patient.
Auditory Treatments
Therapeutic Listening
Auditory Integration Training
Listening Fitness
SPOTT Groups
(speech, occupational therapy and teaching)
Social Skills groups
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Enhancement of age related skills including:
- Communication Skills
- Listening Skills
- Eye contact
- Turn taking
- Body language
- Peer interaction
- Greetings
- Reading facial expressions
Social Skills not only teaches targeted skills, it allows the child to practice with other peers. To teach and then apply, this allows feedback from peers and therapists running the group.
Interactive Metronome
A computer based program that enables individuals to exercise and improve the processes of motor planning sequencing.
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