Special Provision input
OT
The Occupational Therapy will focus on the following to develop your child’s needs:
Sensory Based Strategies
The programme has been developed to incorporate a range of activities in order to assist the student in gaining independence through understanding what their senses need, when they senses need feeding and how. Engaging in sensory circuits and sensory diets that incorporate gross and fine motor sensory strategies the students can begin to demonstrate skills to manage they own sensory needs independently in the future.
The session objective:
Students will gain sensory strategies to regulate their own body allowing them to engage in all activities of daily living.
Fine Motor skills
This term students will develop fine motor skills along with developing working memory and social skills through board games. Board games offer students the ability to develop and strengthen their hand and finger muscles. Whether it is grasping pegs, using finger isolation to move a small ball or object or manipulating shapes it is all learning disguised as fun. Occupational Therapists utilizes board games as part of their therapy when working with school age children.
The session objectives:
- To develop manual dexterity
- To increase hand strength
- To improve hand-eye coordination
- To develop sensory awareness in hands and fingers
- To develop bilateral coordination (using two hands together)
- To develop attention and listening skills
Visual Skills
The students will engage in activities to develop visual motor integration and visual memory. Students will navigate through an obstacle course copy 3D blocks, place letters into a bag and feel, Identify numbers and letters on the board that are wrong, word puzzles, play games such as BINGO, have the students grade a paper that the letters are formed wrong and find objects in a cluttered picture.
The session objectives:
- To further develop and improve the following visual skills
- Visual discrimination
- Tracking and scanning skills
- Visual memory
- Visual closure
- Visual motor integration
SaLT
The School Speech and Language Therapy will focus on the following to develop your child’s needs:
Lego Therapy
The students will work in groups to develop their communication and interaction skills. Students will have 1 of 3 roles that they have to undertake and work together to create a Lego model in the picture provided. Lego is used as it is fun and can naturally reinforce appropriate social behaviour. This approach can be used with verbal and non-verbal communicators.
The session objectives are to develop the following communication skills:
- Joint attention
- Task focus
- Sharing and turn-taking
- Learning new language concepts
- Describing
- Giving instructions
- Sequencing
- Communicating ideas
- Listening to others
- Collaboration
- Joint problem-solving
- Compromise
- Turn taking
- Sharing
- Shared enjoyment
Therapy strategy for home linking in all of the above.
Baking can be lots of fun and rather messy, many people don’t realise that amongst all the mess, children are developing skills that are needed for school. In the kitchen, we use maths skills (measuring, counting), visual perceptual and spatial perceptual skills (pouring, fitting biscuits on a tray), and lots of coordination skills.
In addition, children can develop many communication skills including attention and listening, social interaction, giving and following instructions, learning new words, sequencing and problem solving.
Baking can be really helpful to develop all of these abilities.
Baking cookies can develop these skills:
- Sifting flour into a large bowl trains a child to use both hands together; and for one hand to support while the other does the main task. Children need this skill to tie shoelaces, cut with scissors and draw a line with a ruler.Rolling balls of dough before placing them on the baking tray is a good activity to boost bilateral coordination.
- Rolling out biscuit dough with a rolling pin uses symmetrical bilateral coordination – both hands are working together to do the same thing.
Visual perception skills and spatial perception skills are developed when the child has to learn to place the cookie cutters on the dough in a way that does not waste space.
After rolling out and cutting the cookies, the child will be using bilateral coordination to roll the dough back up again.
Math skills are also boosted as children count out ingredients (eg 6 eggs, 2 cups flour), and also as they measure and weigh the ingredients.
