Occupational Therapy
14
Oct
2012
Press Here: The App
I took this photo from a magazine at some waiting room. I keep meaning to keep it for my OT kids…
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none
14
Oct
2012
Weighted blanket for reading time…
The OT child was loving the 10 pound weighted blanket (distributed weight) while reading 🙂 The child chooses that spot and blanket each time for a calming experience. I know the evidence on weighted blankets is spotty, but from an anecdotal perspective, I have some OT kids that really benefit from the weight when working. Make sure to follow basic safety precautions and understand what you are doing before you just go randomly throw a weighted blanket at a child – speak to an OT.
By the way, I know they typically recommend blankets at like 3-5% of a child’s weight, but I don’t fully grasp the logic. If a child is going to lie down and have a distributed-weight blanket put on top of them for just a few minute at a time and will not be weight-bearing, and has no physical issues, and an OT is sitting beside them for that short period of time…even my youngest children, ie Kindergarten level, like the 10 pounds blanket which far exceeds the 5% recommendation. (Only some of my childen like it but those that do LOVE it.)
Any OTs out there want to chime in on their thoughts on acceptable weight percentages for the above scenario of short, supervised, non weight-bearing situations?
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: 1
13
Oct
2012
Writing charm try-out
Trying out Tonya’s TherapyFunZone.com’s new writing charm for a child who fists his pencil. When we are working on new grasps/grips, I just let him draw so that he is getting to do a preferred activity, rather than pairing the grip with something he doesn’t like.
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none
12
Oct
2012
OT downers
The more sparkles in my hair, the more stressed I am….Right now I have about 30 which equals max stressedoutosity… I feel like I made about fifty thousand mistakes today. For each of them, I was trying to go above and beyond and that’s what led to the mistake. Maybe I should stick with mediocre 🙂 I’ve been sitting here crying because I’m so overwhelmed with all the mistakes. None of them were big but they all added up in my brain, not to mention personal life stuff. I got several lovely emails today and was part of several IEP meetings today where the kids are doing absolutely fabulous so I have lots of reasons to celebrate, but sometimes the negative stuff wins. We’ve all had that, where we get ten compliments and one insult and we can only agonize over the insult. That’s me today. But, dude, I’ve been almost crying over the store being out of lemon pepper tuna, so I think I’m just extra sensitive these days. I want to end this on a cheery note but I can’t think of anything so maybe I’ll leave this on a cherry note instead, here it is, horizontal o–
update….I did cheer up. 🙂
update 2: I got an absolutely amazing letter from the director of special education letting me know how three different principals praised me at a recent principals meeting. 🙂
update 2: I got an absolutely amazing letter from the director of special education letting me know how three different principals praised me at a recent principals meeting. 🙂
Sometimes you need the rain to get to the rainbows!
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none
11
Oct
2012
Sea anemones have preferred activities too. :)
I often go walking with some co-workers at the beach/state park after work as it’s on my way home and a nice calming way to get some exercise while admiring beautiful scenery AND getting social time, so it kills like a flock of birds with one stone. 🙂
Our district has an awesome autism behavioral specialist (let’s call her Tootie) and over the course of working in the district I’ve learned to use terms such as “preferred activities” and “non-preferred activities” for the OT kiddos so instead of saying “This kid hates handwriting” we say “Handwriting is a non preferred activity for this child…” anyway. Now that you have the set-up.
Tootie and I were walking on the beach after work and there is this huge rock called Flat Rock that was accessible due to low tide, so we circled around it, looking at all the crabs, barnacles, mussels, sea anoemeomaoneones, etc. Sea anemone is a hard word to spell, it makes me have to think which I hate. ANYWAY, I grew up in San Diego so I am very used to sea anemoneonanes, so I showed Tootie, who is NOT from this area, how you can put your finger in the sea anemone hole and it closes on your finger and looks weird. She was fascinated by this.
Tootie: Do you think the sea anemone minds when you do that?
Me: Well I’m guessing it’s a non-preferred activity.
Rather sadly, I wasn’t even saying it to be funny. I’ve just gotten used to the lingo!
Category: laughs, Occupational Therapy | Comments: none
11
Oct
2012
Quiet Mouths, Loud Hands: How Classroom Teachers Can Quickly, Quietly, And Effectively Use Line Time
Teachers constantly (rightly) bemoan the lack of time to get everything done within a day. Kids spend a lot of time in line waiting on transitions and this is a perfect opportunity for teachers to work on fine motor skills with their kids and incorporate academic practice at the same time. Many children, not just those in special education, benefit from familiarizing themselves with their hands and how to consciously move their hands in a variety of positions which can end up really helping with handwriting.
Here are a few easy and quick ideas on ways to use line time as a learning opportunity, both with fine motor skills and academic skills. It will also keep them occupied and therefore quieter. 🙂
1. TEACH YOUR CHILDREN THE SIGN LANGUAGE ALPHABET. You can start as early as you want although of course it may be challenging for the very young. There are tons of sites that show it, including Youtube. http://lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/wallpaper1.htm is an example of the alphabet. Even if you just do a few letters a day in line, the very act of them having to use their hands to copy yours is a great exercise. As you and the children become more proficient, you can begin to do your spelling words, ie everyone do what I do, c, a, t….Or “Everyone show me how to spell cat” etc. Of course you have to talk at first as you teach them, but eventually you should be able to do most of this very quietly. And whether you ever get to the point of using it for spelling or not, they are getting familiar with isolating their fingers on command in a variety of positions. You can also of course incorporate disability awareness into this. 🙂
2. DO MATH IN LINE. You can quietly ask things like Two plus two equals What, Class, Show me with your fingers…And they all hold up their 4 fingers. If you really want to get ambitious you can teach them how to count to ten using just one hand in American Sign Language because 6, 7, 8, and 9 are great ones to work on finger opposition. I always found it very convenient to know how to count to 10 on each hand because when refereeing fencing matches it was the only way I could remember the score was to hold it in place on both hands. You can also ask them science-like questions or logic questions, such as, “How long do you think it will take to do X? Show me with your fingers how many minutes” or “Do you think A will happen or B will happen? Put 1 finger in the air if you choose A, and 2 fingers if you choose B…”
3. THUMB TO FINGER TOUCHES. If you aren't interested in learning or teaching the American Sign Language alphabet and numbers (but it's really awesome so I hope you do), you can just have the children work on touching their fingers to their thumb one at a time, ie everybody hold your hand in the air, touch your finger to your thumb, now next finger, next finger…Copy what I do, etc. You will be surprised at how hard it is for many of them. They may have to look and go hesitantly. As you keep practicing it should get easier and then you can up the ante…Both hands at once, doing it with eyes closed, faster, etc.
4. SILLY FINGER MOVES. You can have them show you thumbs-up, the OKay sign, spirit hands (wiggling their hands), wrist circles, fingers opening and closing, putting on their “gloves” (by squeezing down each finger with the other hand), pressing their hands together, making individual fingers do bows (watch out for that middle finger, lol), “show me your thumb”, “show me your pinkie”, etc etc. Any movements that focus on a nice round open webspace (that space between the thumb and index finger, when you make the OK sign), are especially great. One teacher told me her kids had trouble with making a nice round O so she had them pretend to put on glasses. Great idea.
In conclusion, while there is definitely an initial learning curve, you can focus on “Quiet Mouths, Loud Hands” during line time to work on building and practicing academic skills in a quiet way, as well as improving fine motor skills, which often translates to improved handwriting skills and increases in confidence in their ability to navigate their world.
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none
11
Oct
2012
Red ribbon week + Mental Regurgitation
It's Red Ribbon week so lots of wearing red and how to be healthy stuff being posted on doors. I liked this pledge. I also liked reading the pledges of a bunch of our kiddos, I think my favorite was “I will not pretend to smoke…” ahahahahaa.
There are also literally a lot of red ribbons being tied around campus. I may bring some red ribbon tomorrow from my stashes and have some of my shoe-tying kiddos practice with red ribbons on the gates. Or I may forget. But maybe some of you will remember. 🙂 Tomorrow I have IEP at School X, treatment at School Y, then another IEP at School Z…….But I think it will be an okay day. It ends early as I have a hair appointment! Excited to get my hair cut for my birthday. Then Pilates and then I should be home by like 6pm which is super crazy and weird. 🙂
Today I went in a little late as I didn't have kids scheduled ASAP and I've been working about ten million hours a week. Then I saw kids the rest of the day, met with a parent for an hour after school to discuss things to do at home in terms of fine motor skills to help a child stop fisting his pencil (it may be more a sensory thing though, hmm), and then worked another few hours trying to catch up on paperwork and organization. I'm really finally slowly getting the hang of it, as shocking as that may sound to anyone who knows me and my workspace in real life. The janitor came and visited me a few time, lol. At one point he said he wanted to close the door to the room I was in so that it was safe, because if he came back and there was blood everywhere he'd have a lot to clean. It cracked me up. He has an identical twin brother and one is at some of my schools and one is at some of the others and so I can never remember which is which. I finally left at 7:30pm, went straight to Pilates Candlelight, then got gas, the went to the store for lemon pepper tuna (they were still out – I nearly cried again, dude why am I so emotional), then went walking with my friend up the hill to my house, and got home at 10pm to feed my cats (I got them sardines for the first time, I figure black cat needs some excitement in his old age), eat my dinner, talk to my mom, etc. And now play online and blog to chill out my mind. My salad was a Country Italian Salad from Trader Joe's, I love the dressing in it, but I mixed it with spring mix, cherry tomatoes, avocado, white balsamic vinegar, lemon, pepper, salt, and then some salt and vinegar potato chip “croutons” so it was like a party in my mouth!! I've been eating a lot healthier lately and working out a lot more even while working a lot. I'm proud of me. Anyone who knows me knows how insanely self-deprecating I normally am, and so to say that means aliens may have taken over my body.
Today I did a treatment where we made the child a visual for his desk for the lowercase letters b, d, p, q, and k which are the ones he struggles most with. I drew the b d p q and k on a strip, and then he colored them to make sense, ie the “b” had a bumblebee theme, he decide he wanted “d” to be a drop of water so he put blue around it, “p” was a pig so he added a pig nose…Etc. I am waiting for permission from Mom before I post, but it was very creative. I put it in the “to be laminated” folder at his school so hopefully it will be helpful for him.
Also did one with a little boy who was super disappointed I forgot to bring “Monster cheese” today, it was my fault because as we were walking I had told him we should give Monster cheese a bath. And then it turned out I hadn't brought him. I suck. To be fair though I had lots of other fun toys. We typically make Monster Cheese eat a bunch of stuff then throw it all up and he likes that. So today when I was telling him we needed to give Monster Cheese a bath, I said “Monster Cheese is getting kind of dirty, he threw up all over himself like 10 times yesterday.” The boy paused and said “You're a silly person, so I think when you say that you mean maybe he landed in the dirt since he can't really throw up.” I laughed and was like yes, great problem solving, I am just pretending. I loved his thought process, so great for an OT kiddo to realize that a silly person would say silly things that probably aren't true.
Also did one where we used a metronome (60 bpm) to go over spelling words, one letter to each beat (ie.. K…I…N…G)…worked on puzzles, re-writing stuff, etc etc. Blah blah blah.
Well it's almost midnight and black cat is purring on my chest as I write this. It makes up for how he wakes me up at 6am every day by biting my fingers. I can only assume my fingers appear to be delicate morsels of sausage….
I'd apologize for this being so long but y'all know I can't help it, bless my poor brevity-lacking soul…
I'm about to go work a little bit more on my “Quiet Mouths, Loud Hands” post which is about classroom teachers incorporating fine motor handwork into line time, and then bed.
KD
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none
11
Oct
2012
Monster Cheese Wins OT Battles
Of all the toys I bring in for quick fine motor breaks, “Monster Cheese” is the one I get asked about the most. Each time I see a kid, especially ones I don’t see often, they request monster cheese. Now of course monster cheese is actually this benign cutesy Stretchy Cheese toy you can buy on Amazon that has these little mice with it where youc an stick the mice in the holes. However, Monster Cheese is way more fun. I provide them with tons of small objects and then they have Monster Cheese eat as much as they can then throw it all up. In a recent case I had a little girl with a marvelous imagination. As she pulled out each item, she explained why he had eaten it. I loved it.
“…He ate the panda and the dragon because he went to China…”
“…He went to the future and ate the Transformer…”
“…He went to Bert and Ernie’s house and ate their rubber duckie…”
“…He went to a poor person’s house and ate their baby…”
“…He went to the ocean and ate the poor baby sea turtle…”
“….He went out on a date with a lady shark…” (the shark has a bright pink mouth for some reason, guess that made it a lady shark)
Etc etc. I had to struggle not to laugh too hard at a few of her choice stories. As you can see Monster Cheese is looking a little rough, but he cleans up well. For only a few dollars I think Monster Cheese is a great toy to have in your OT toolbox. It’s kind of expensive on Amazon, you may be able to find it cheaper elsewhere.
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none
10
Oct
2012
The concept of time – Visual Timers to help understanding + Experimentation
Most OTs, including me, use timers ALL THE TIME with our kiddos. For example, “first we do X for 5 minutes, Y for 3 minutes” or “We have 10 minutes before you go back to class” or whatever. We verbally explain time to them as well as set timers so they see an ending. For kids working on non-preferred tasks, having an end in sight is super important. Or for kids with slow processing and/or difficulty with transitions, the timers can be super important to avoid melt-downs, ie if a child is playing with free choice and we walk in and say “Time to go back to class”, it can cause a meltdown instantly. I have watched parents with neurotypical kids do this and the kids (frequently) obey and it always amazes me. For our kids, there’s always the timer as well as usually a preview or two, ie “Okay, first you have 5 minutes of free choice, then you go back to class.” “I’m setting the timer for 5 minuts, here it is next to you” and then usually “The timer says you have about 45 seconds left…” or whatever the amount is if I walk past.
With all that being said, I think timers are super helpful (and Susan Burwash, an OT talks a lot on Facebook about “pomodoros” which I recommend you google in regards to time management for adults) but ANYWAY sorry about that tangent (and secant haha), the point is, most kids don’t have a great concept of time. So to set a timer is only helpful to a limited extent as the numbers can be quite “abstract” in a sense to our younger kids….Which is where VISUAL TIMERS come in. These are usually timers that have a bright color to show the passing of time, ie if you set a timer for 20 minutes, then there is that wedge of color and as the 20 minutes disappear so does the red color. One “beef” I have is that the timers are almost always red and I feel like that’s an aggressive color. BUT very helpful, especially for our younger kids, in grasping what is happening with time. It used to be you had to buy them and they cost like $30 or more and that’s super aggravating and expensive. Now, however, there are free and/or cheap iPad and iPhone apps that allow you to do the visual timer. Many of my classrooms put the visual timer on their iPad and then project it onto the screen during free choice time. I use “Time Timer” and it works well.
Moving on, I had a child yesterday who was very concerned about time. He wanted to make sure he got back for “buddies” and didn’t want to miss anything. When he found out there was only 10 minutes left until buddies, he became worried, saying “We only have ten minutes to get back!” He was in an upstairs classroom and buddies was downstairs, but seriously it was probably a 2-3 minute walk MAXIMUM. I realized that while he was quite aware of time, he didn’t necessarily have a good grasp of how fast things take. So next time I see him, we’re going to “experiment” with the timer. For example, I’m going to ask him, how long do you think it will take us to get from here to your classroom? Let’s say he says 10 minutes. Okay, fine. I’ll set 10 minutes on the timer and we’ll walk down. Then we’ll see how much time is left. Or “How long do you think it will take you to write this sentence?” Etc. So that he can see his concept of time is probably quite skewed. Sometimes I’ll ask a child, “How long do you want to jump on the trampoline” or whatever and they respond “20 minutes!” and I know in reality they probably can handle about 45 seconds. For whatever reason, being an accurate estimator of time is important to me, so in those cases we also work on adjusting chronological reality. 🙂
In conclusion. Use Visual timers that show the passage of time in color, as appropriate, and consider using timers for children who need an end in sight, and also consider time experimentation to help kids understand how long things TRULY take.
In post-conclusion: Beyond the app “Time Timer” (and there may be better ones and if you know of them please share), I also recently heard about one called “Lickety Split” by one of my kid’s moms. They use it during clean-up and its music speeds up as you near completion of a time and she imitated it and it sounded super adorable. I haven’t had a chance to download it yet but she loves it and I bet it rocks, so consider checking it out 🙂
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: 2
10
Oct
2012
OTs as Healers of the Heart…
I just got home from the store and almost cried (don’t laugh) when I find out the one thing I wanted, lemon pepper tuna, was all out. So then I realized with my BRILLIANT mind that probably lemon pepper tuna was tuna with lemon and pepper. So I set out to make the salad I had wanted. Spring mix, then a layer of albacore tuna, then a bunch of squeezed lemon and a ton of pepper, then some white balsamic vinegar (white balsamic is my fav), then half an avocado, and finally, the part that made it all worth it….salt and vinegar potato chips on top. Yes, not the most healthy choice of croutons, but I’m eating pretty healthy these days….things like nonfat greek yogurt with fruit, nuts, salads, protein shakes….trying to get back on track. I also went to Pilates tonight, but a higher power loves me, because it was cancelled. 🙂 I was so tired, I was very grateful.
Today I got to stay at one school – treated a bunch of kids, consulted with a bunch of teachers, and got interviewed by a student, Shelby, who works in an after school program and is taking an anthropology course on healing. She had set up a time with me to be interviewed about OT as it was an assignment in her class to seek out a profession she was interested in. I was running a little late, whoops, but she was very nice. I was frantically cleaning up the room while we talked.
Some food for thought from that interview. And by food for thought, when you consider the IQ of an eggplant, I don’t feel like that’s a very good expression.
1) She asked me if I considered myself a healer. That was an interesting question. We can talk about downright physiological healing, but I see OT – in its highest forms, as healing the heart, through the hands, to semi quote Ora Ruggles. 🙂 Speaking of hands, my cat just bit me.
2) She asked about whether or not OT evolved. I told her every day brought new discoveries and that if you thought you knew everything as an OT, that you were stupid. 🙂 Because I’m a super diplomatic person….
By the way, Susan B., an OT friend on Facebook, recently posted a link to the full copy of The Healing Heart,
ou can supposedly read this online. It’s one of my favorite books and it really inspired me as an OT. My mom also read it while she was recovering from recent ankle surgery and she really liked it. It’s really hard to get your hands on a copy that isn’t super expensive, so I hope the link works for you all.
PS – my great-grandma’s name was Ora – coincidence? 🙂
PS2 – super is my new favorite word. I am super sorry about that and will be super careful in the future to not use it so often…..
PS2 – super is my new favorite word. I am super sorry about that and will be super careful in the future to not use it so often…..
Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: none