Therapy and Treatment Goals
The Occupational Therapists at Abilities First LLC will create a individualized treatment plan to help your child progress and succeed.
Some of the issues that will be addressed are:
- Feeding: oral motor skills, self feeding, helping the ‘picky’ eater
- Managing meltdowns/ improving self regulation
- Manipulating tools: scissors, fork/spoon, pencils/crayons
- Motor planning: helping the ‘clumsy’ child who falls a lot, bumps into things, and is awkward in movement
- Prewriting: drawing shapes, draw a person
- Self care/dressing/grooming (including zipping, buttons, and shoe tying)
- Sensory registration: helping the child who is hypersensitive (over registers) or hyposensitive (under registers) to sight, smell, sound, taste, movement, touch, or pressure.
- Visual motor: eye hand coordination, imitation of movement, building/construction, writing
- Visual perceptual: puzzles, matching skills, foundational skills for reading/math/spelling
- Writing skills: printing, cursive, keyboarding
Specialized Services
With the staff at Abilities First LLC trained and experienced in Occupational Therapy evaluation and treatment, we provide specialized services to infants, toddlers, adolescents and teenagers. We have additional training and certification to perform the following:
Other Services and Programs
- Bal-A-VisX
Bal-A-Vis-x is a series of rhythmic balance, auditory, and vision exercises for brain and body integration. Improvements noted include decreased stress, increased motor coordination, increased rhythmicity, increased visual motor skills, increased attention span, reduced impulsivity, improved memory, and greater academic success.
- Fine Motor/Handwriting
Writing legibly is much more than just practice. Writing requires adequate hand strength, coordination, and appropriate registration of proprioceptive and tactile input to hold and manipulate the pencil and grade how much pressure you need to mark the paper. Good visual perceptual and visual motor skills are needed to copy the information correctly and place it on the identified part of the paper. A problem in one or more of these areas could cause your child to have difficulty in forming letters/numbers or writing them backwards, writing letters on a line or within a space, keeping letters a consistent size within a word, spacing letters within a word or between words. One of our Occupational Therapists can work with your child to identify the underlying reasons for difficulty with handwriting and help him/her to be successful in their writing skills.
- Infant Massage
Infant massage uses gentle, deep pressure strokes to help the child with overall regulation of body systems. Benefits seen with infant massage include: improved eye contact, increased socialization and vocalizing, increased sense of attachment/bonding, general relaxation, decreased postural tone, improved circulation and deeper respirations, improved regularity of bowel movements, greater weight gain, increased oral intake, more regular sleep patterns, decreased hypersensitivity.
- Kinesio Taping
This rehabilitative treatment technique makes use of strategic taping using Kinesio Tape, which is made of cotton but has elastic properties. Kinesio tape can be used stimulate weak muscles, provide support and help reduce muscle fatigue, increase range of motion, and relax soft tissue and improve lymphatic flow.
- Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention (REI)
Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention (REI) is an auditory program that uses musical rhythm to stimulate and repattern neurological function. It uses rhythmical combinations that correspond to specific behavioral and cognitive functions. Improvements have been noted in: sleep, anxiety, aggression, social skills, attention span, learning abilities, sensory processing, self-stimulatory behaviors, hyperactivity/impulsivity, and communication/interaction skills.
- Therapeutic Yoga
Fun age appropriate yoga exercises to help children and adolescents improve their coordination, communication, and gross/fine motor skills. Improvements have been noted in core strength, balance, range of motion/flexibility, motor planning, body awareness, breath support, and calming.
- Feeding
Feeding issues can have many underlying causes. Our Occupational Therapists evaluate feeding difficulties by looking at the whole person. Many areas are addressed during feeding treatment including: postural control (the ability to maintain a safe position for eating), oral motor skills (the ability to safely and adequately bite, chew and swallow food), sensory processing (the ability to feel food in the mouth and tolerate different textures, temperatures, flavors of food), utensil use, mealtime behaviors, and the mealtime environment (the setting, seating and the child-caregiver interaction during feeding).
