Developing community connections to enable children to function to the best of their ability within their environment.
Pretend play skills
Play is essential for social skills, adaptability, creativity and development of Metacognition.
Louise is able to provide assessment for children from six months to 5-11 years. Focusing on the childs’ pretend play ability, enjoyment of play and the child’s sense of self are enhanced.
Play intervention focuses on starting at the child’s interest areas and their current level of development. Play intervention is usually intensive with breaks in therapy for periods of consolidation.
It is very important that parents/care givers are involved in the play intervention to build their own skills to support the child outside of therapy time.
Handwriting
The research is clear that handwriting and literacy go hand in hand. Children with more developed handwriting are more developed in literacy (Wolf, Berninger and Abbot, 2017).
At The Therapy Arch 1:1 Handwriting assessment and 1:1 Intensive intervention are undertaken for approximately 10 weeks to assist children in the development of their handwriting skills.
*Wolf, B.,Berninger,V., & Abbott, p 217-237R (2017) Effective beginning handwriting instruction: Multimodal,consistent format for 2 years, and linked to spelling and composing. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol 30 (2) pp 299-317.
Toileting support
Being toilet trained requires lots of complex skills including:
Communication skills
Cognitive skills, Understanding the concept of toileting.
Sensory skills
Physical skills
Toileting difficulties or learning to be continent can be stressful time for families and for children. Seeking support with toileting difficulties in the early stages can help shorten the length of time difficulties continue.
When to refer?
Toileting independence is required for school entry.
The child is distressed about going to the toilet or and appears to be ignoring toileting and has lots of accidents.
Toileting difficulties are affecting the child and family, causing increase in stress in the household or impacting on family and child’s social and school activities.
Professional development in schools
To provide Occupational Therapy services to more children in the community, The Therapy Arch is connecting with schools to assist with professional development for teachers.
Our aim at The Therapy Arch is to provide relevant and evidence based professional development to schools, specifically for hand writing and the development of pretend play skills. Our hope is that this learning will support children in the classroom.