Services Performed


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Our staff is trained and experienced in Occupational Therapy evaluation and treatment of infants, toddlers, adolescents and teenagers. We have additional training and certification in the following specialized services:

Astronaut Training

Astronaut Training is a movement and sound activated protocol designed to enhance the dynamic interplay of moving, looking and listening.  The Vestibular-Auditory-Visual triad provides the backdrop for virtually everything we do and thus determines much about the quality of our lives.
Vestibular deficits are often found in children with delayed motor development, perceptual or attention deficits, learning disabilities, emotional problems, language disorders and autism.
Through the proper functioning of our Vestibular-Auditory-visual Triad, the sights and sounds of our world become meaningful (rather than scary) and entice us to move, explore, and engage with objects, people, and events.  Astronaut training is the use of specifically designed exercises used during treatment sessions by a trained occupational Therapist and concise home program activities intended to activate and integrate the vestibular, auditory and visual systems to promote optimum function.

Balametrics

Balavisx

Brain Gym

Development of Functional Hand Skills

Extended School Year (ESY)

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.  We use activities and materials from Handwriting Without Tears and Loops and Groups.

Infant Massage

Kinesio Taping

Rhythmic Entrainment Iintervention (REI)

Self-care Training

Sensory Integrative Treatment

Sensory integration theory was developed to better understand the relationships between the neural processing of sensation, sensorimotor behavior, and early academic learning.  The ground-breaking work of Dr. A. Jean Ayers synthesized knowledge from clinical work, research, and an untold number of scientific articles to develop an understanding of the connection between sensory integration and learning.  In doing this, she brought the body's ability to organize, process, and respond to sensation into the realm of academic learning.A
In sensory integration interventions, there is a strong emphasis on the individual being actively engaged in the sensory experience and then responding adaptively to that incoming information.  In other words, how we move in response to sensory input leads to overall organization and optimal function.  The treatment approach that Ayers developed uses enhanced sensory input, particularly from the vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile systems, in the context of activities that would help to integrate primitive reflexes and challenge the individual to perform at increasingly higher levels of function.  Additional sensory systems, such as visual and auditory, are integrated into treatment sessions.  These systems help the body to orient to time and space and help us to function in different environments.
An Occupational Therapist might suggest sensory integrative treatment if your child has concerns in any of the following areas:
  • Emotional - frustrates easily, excessive tantrums/meltdowns, poor self-esteem, poor self regulation, withdraws from others
  • Cognitive Skills - distractible, unable to transfer/generalize skills
  • Fine Motor - difficult manipulating tools (scissors, fork, spoon, pencil, crayons)
  • Self Care - bathing, grooming, dressing (including buttons, zippers, snaps and shoe tying)
  • Postural Control - slouches, leans on everything/everyone, flops out of chair
  • Gross Motor - falls a lot, bumps into things, awkward with running/skipping/hopping
  • Visual Perceptual Skills - difficulty with puzzles or matching, loses place when reading or with math problems
  • Sensory Registration - hypersensitive to sounds or touch, touches everything or nothing, picky eater, hates being hugged or too close or excessive touching of others, fear of movement or craves constant movement, lethargic/sedentary

Summer Camps

Groups will have a 4 to 1 ratio. Each class will be led by an Occupational Therapist.  Minimum of 4 students and maximum of 8 students per class.
Fine Motor Fun Camp -  This camp is for children ages 4 to 6 who will not enter Kindergarten until the Fall.  Sessions will emphasize fine motor skills needed for pre-writing, grasp, introduction to upper case letters, writing name, attention to task, turn taking, and two hand use through a variety of sensory experiences and games.
Write-On into Kindergarten - This camp is for children ages 5 to 7 who will enter Kindergarten in the Fall.  Session swill emphasize core strength, body awareness, right/left awareness and learn to write upper case letters and introduction to lower case letters and simple words with effective pencil grasp, praxis, sizing, and spacing through a variety of fun games and sensory experiences.
Write 4 U - This camp is offered to children who will enter grades 1st - 3rd in the Fall who have already had initial instruction in upper and lower case letters but need further work on core/hand strength, grasp, sizing, and spacing of letters, words, and sentence writing.

Therapeutic Yoga

Therapeutic Listening

Therapeutic Listening is a sound-based intervention that is embedded in the sensory integration perspective.  Therapeutic Listening incorporates a variety of movement activities designed to elicit the adaptive responses that are the cornerstone of sensory integrative treatment.  These activities develop and strengthen the postural responses along with healthy and relaxed breathing patterns.  In this way, Therapeutic Listening sets up the body and the nervous system for emergent skills and has been found to decrease the time necessary to meet treatment goals.  The following areas of change have been noted during or following Therapeutic Listening: improved arousal/attention/focus, balance/coordination, praxis, facial affect, awareness of the environment, decreased gravitational insecurity, decreased auditory hypersensitivity, modulation of ability to remain calm in busy environments, self initiation of play/work behaviors, increased social interaction/eye contact, decreased self stimulation behaviors, and improving eating and sleeping patterns/skills.
Because the auditory system has connection to many parts of the brain, sound is a powerful way to access the nervous system and affect changes at all levels.
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