Occupational Therapy helps children develop necessary skills to engage and become independent in daily activities such as play (building, coloring, puzzles, social interaction), school-based activities (handwriting, drawing, cutting, typing, attention, organization, self-regulation) and self-care (bathing, toileting, dressing, feeding). Occupational therapy utilizes play-based and functional interventions to improve skills in areas of weakness.
Listed below are some common intervention areas:
- Fine Motor Development: Strengthening muscles in the arm/hand needed for fingers to pick up small items, manipulate/grasp various tools and objects.
- Visual Motor Integration: Improving hand-eye coordination required for fine motor activities such as drawing shapes/letters, scissor use, buttoning/unbuttoning, stringing beads etc.
- Gross Motor Coordination/Postural stability: Improving core strength for functional participation in daily activities such as getting dressed, sitting during table top activities and walking/running/gross motor play skills.
- Sensory Processing: Helping integrate information coming in from the different senses such as building tolerance to touching various textures, learning self-coping strategies and improving attention.
- Environmental Modifications: Enabling increased participation and success in activities such as providing adapted lined paper, special pencil grips/adapted utensils, slant boards etc.