| |
|
Environmental
By Rondalyn V. Whitney, MOT, OTR/L
- Destress the environment, minimize activities and expectations
- Eliminate judgement, replace with understanding, help child gain understanding for self
- Provide structure environment
- Provide environment enriched with movement opportunities, sensory opportunities, and social opportunities
- Facilitate successful occupational performance
- Look for long range, work to find meaning and purpose
- Anticipate vocational needs and plan ahead
- Set up and insist on organizational skills AT ALL TIMES
- Model your own thinking processes, talk openly about mistakes, develop atmosphere of attempts and errors as accepted methods of learning
- Teach self-advocacy and acceptance
- Support the teacher with educational opportunities, materials
- Realize your child will need extra time from the teacher and provide her/him with adequate support, acknowledgement, and gifts of YOUR time to compensate. If you’ll grade a 2 foot tall stack of homework for a teacher, that teacher will be better positioned to create your child’s special assignments
- Insist on understanding at the school, accomodations, and support the teachers to receive adequate education about this disorder
Changing the Sensory Processing
- Provide opportunities for putting the “me” back in the picture through proprioceptive, vestibular, deep pressure touch
- Develop motor planning skills
- Develop problem solving skills
- Provide course of Occupational Therapy with sensory integration techniques
- Provide course of Speech-Language therapy (not articulation)
- Join a karate, swim, or other motor skill team
- Take frequent breaks during seated work
- (see list of accommodations for school and home)
- Build endurance with motor activity
- Stress anxiety management – build resilience
Compensatory
- Allow for use of lap top computer for school work
- Provide word lists to compensate for word retrieval problems (make a dictionary and thesaurus part of the child’s homework center)
- Activities requiring drawing, copying, and lengthy writing require too much effort – provide child with teacher outline or pre-written copies
- Use graphic organizers to aid child with organization of thoughts for creative writing, and other longer writing assignments. Use memory enhancing techniques such as mnemonics, rehearsal, chunking, techniques
- Set up a homework center with everything in its place
- Start early with a time management system like Premier from Franklin Covey
- Insist on a binder each year (just one) with a system for organizing all materials. Give bonus/rewards if you can pick up the binder, shake it, and nothing falls out
- Teach handwriting in a simple, concrete way such as with Jan Olsen’s Handwriting Without Tears Program
- Minimize written work – remember, this is a child with high fatigue, poor endurance, and difficulty parallel processing information
- Educate teachers to analyze all homework and desk work for visual overload, handwriting levels (do they want to ascertain the math ability or handwriting? Help them to distinguish)
- Use tape recorders to tape lectures, directions and other information
- Give additional time for assignments
- Use Multi-sensory approach to learning
- Use over-learning rote skills to compensate for difficulties with problem solving
- Take test orally when possible
- Use logical cues with remediating visual-spatial function
- Verbally teach what others intuitively learn
These kids have often not considered that others are making judgements about them based on what they see them do. Discuss other people in the environment – what judgements did the child make about that person? This is often a lead in to what judgements are being made about the child.
|
|
|