OT in school

I've been getting the question, "What does an OT do at schools?" I feel that the online blog may help me clarify the answer to this question. Most of the goals for the child are centered around handwriting. However, our job is to problem-solve why kids are having trouble access the school curriculum. Even though many goals are handwriting based, it's fun to explore why to develop those little hand muscles (called fine motor skills). This means, play-doh, finger paints, shaving cream with letters, rough-and-tumble play, swinging, singing songs with hand movements, and anything my OT brain can think of. We (my supervisor and I) run groups for some of the special needs classrooms. Sometimes we'll doing something related to handwriting, like letter formation, or writing sentences, or it could be an art project.

I like learning about all the different diagnosis and the developmental levels of children. I am also liking seeing sensory integration in action. The different sensory systems that literally have brain wires that cross for children to be able to make sense of their world. I'll write more on sensory integration another time, that's worthy of it's own blog post.

This internship has re-confirmed my love for the younger population. Oh yeah, I've always wanted to work with children. :)

New Motivation

Today at the pre-school I had a very interesting conversation with an Educational Specialist working with Deaf and Hard of Hearing (HOH) babies. She is a cranial sacral therapist among many other talents. Having been a massage therapist myself for many years, I have a interest in the type of work she is doing. Her job is multi-dimensional: involving families, babies, trauma, sign language, spirituality, cranial sacral, and teaching by encouraging development. I found a deep interest and passion in her work. I would love to develop the sensitivity to work with children and infants in profound ways. I walked away from her classroom with a new motivation, cranial sacral therapy.

I have also been trying to teach myself SEE, Signing in Exact English, to communicate more with some of the HOH children I work with. The teacher also loaned me a DVD for learning sign language.

I would like to utilize all the resources I can to work with little ones.

This internship has helped me reaffirmed my desire to work with children. It so much fun!