intervention
in pediatrics
Praxis/Motor Planning Skills
Our occupational therapist uses standardized evaluation tools to assess the child’s praxis skills, also called “motor planning skills”. Praxis skills allow the child to conceive, organize and carry out a movement in a fluid and efficient way. A child with poor motor planning skills will:
- appear clumsy
- tend to drop or knock over objects
- have poor handwriting skills
- have difficulty tying his shoelaces or doing his buttons or zipper
- etc.
Following assessment, the occupational therapist will determine with the child and the family which daily activities are the most important for them to be able to complete and will recommend ways to improve the skills needed to perform these activities, or ways to compensate the challenges the child faces. Our occupational therapist can go to the child’s school to meet with the teachers, explain the cause of the child’s difficulties and suggest ways to facilitate his/her daily functioning at school.
Handwriting skills
Our occupational therapist uses standardized evaluation tools to assess the development level of various prerequisite skills involved in functional handwriting, such as:
- hand preference
- in-hand manipulation skills
- manual dexterity
- muscle tone
- visual-motor coordination and integration levels
Following assessment, our occupational therapist determines which pre-requisite skills require improvement and recommends the best strategy. The intervention may take place as one-on-one sessions or as a work plan provided to the parents with follow-up visits.
Our occupational therapist can go to the child’s school to meet with the teachers, explain the cause of the child’s difficulties and suggest ways to facilitate his/her daily functioning at school.
Visual-perceptual and oculo-motor skills in relation with reading difficulties
Visual-perceptual skills include, but are not limited to, visual discrimination, visual memory, visual closure, etc. They allow a child to perceive and make sense of the visual information presented in the form of letters or symbols. A child who has poor visual-perceptual skills may have difficulty:
- recognizing letters or numbers
- remembering what they just read
- finding visual information on a worksheet loaded with information
- differentiating objects based on their size, shape, orientation, etc.
Oculo-motor skills allow the child to make fluent and rapid eye movements (saccades) or to follow a moving object with the eyes. A child with poor oculo-motor skills may:
- skip words when reading
- have difficulty changing line when reading
- have difficulty finding rapidly a visual information (object, letter, etc.) on a sheet of paper or around him
- complain of eye fatigue or pain.
The intervention may take place as one-on-one sessions or as a work plan provided to the parents with follow-up visits. Our occupational therapist may also recommend to those working with the child other ways to provide visual information based on the child’s abilities.
Sensory Information Processing Skills
The evaluation process helps in determining which type(s) of sensory input (tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular, visual, auditory, etc.) represents the main challenge for the child and if their reaction to those inputs is below normal (hyposensitivity) or above normal (hypersensitivity) at this age level.
One approach used by our occupational therapists is called Rhythmic Movement Training (RMT), which consists in assessing the level of integration of various primitive reflexes. The presence of non-integrated primitive reflexes may lead to hypersensitivity to sounds, touch, light, movement, or visual stimuli. Some children whose primitive reflexes are not completely integrated may seek more sensory stimulation then other children and tend to be constantly moving, climbing, looking for highly-stimulating activities (swing, trampoline, etc.), running instead of walking, looking for strong tastes or loud noises, etc.
Our occupational therapist can also recommend ways to adapt or modify the environments (home, school, daycare, etc.) to compensate the impact of specific sensory elements.
Activities of daily living
Our occupational therapists do home visits to assess the child’s abilities in relation to daily living activities (eating, getting dressed, using the bathroom, personal hygiene, etc.).
Following assessment, the occupational therapist determines with the child and the parents which daily living activities are the most important for the child to complete independently. The occupational therapist can target specific pre-requisite skills to develop or recommend ways to compensate the child’s functional limitations (motor, cognitive, etc.). They may also recommend ways to adapt the activity or modify the environment, as well as the use of technical aids that will help the child perform meaningful activities with as much independence as possible.
Autism-related difficulties
Our occupational therapist works with the child with autism and the parents to determine the functional limitations of the child and the main challenges for the family. The goal is to optimize the child’s independence in daily life and optimize the level of social participation.
Our occupational therapist can go to the child’s school or daycare centre to meet with the educators, explain the cause of the child’s difficulties and suggest strategies to facilitate his/her daily functioning in school or daycare.
