Solace Celebration: Makayla’s Blossoming in her Occupational and Speech Therapy

Every other week, we highlight one of the incredible kids we work with: We celebrate their wins and feature their progress. We looked at Oliver knocking some intentional curve balls out of the park by listening and following directions. This week, we’re focusing on Makayla and the progress she’s made in such a short time in her occupational therapy and speech-language therapy!

Makayla’s Progress with Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy

This week’s celebration post is for Makayla! She is making amazing progress working with her COTA Anisha, enjoying all things unicorn, arts and crafts, and just being silly. Upon remote connection to her therapy sessions, Makayla works hard on her fine and visual motor and executive functioning goals. She’s improved her self-regulation skills by engaging in 3 minute intervals of proprioceptive and vestibular input through yoga poses. She also continues to make great gains towards her writing goals with improvements in each session towards letter formation, spacing and sizing. There is more! Makayla’s speech-language pathologist, Lamya, explained that in two weeks time, Makayla has increased her ability to identify each sound in a word without cues, improving her phonemic awareness skills for reading. Makayla’s mother is overjoyed to see Makayla becoming more independent with her reading skills. Way to go Makayla!

What are Proprioceptive and Vestibular Inputs?

These inputs refer to the perception a person has of their body movement. An easy way to understand each term is that Proprioceptive inputs are associated with perception of your body position, where Vestibular inputs are associated with sensation of change in body position, direction or head movement.

What is Occupational Therapy, and How Does it Work with Telemedicine?

Occupational Therapy helps children with visual motor skills, fine motor skills, sensory processing, task management, activities of daily living (ADL), sensory integration and much more. It is extremely beneficial for reaching developmental milestones, and can be of great benefit for those with neurological disorders. Our team of occupational therapists (OT’s) are extremely skilled and create individualized care plans to help each and every child with their own unique needs.

Our Pediatric Telehealth Occupational Therapy provides all the benefits of occupational therapy without the need to come into one of our clinics. We believe a child learns best in their own environment, where they are most comfortable. Teletherapy sessions are a fun way to receive occupational therapy. Parental involvement is another wonderful benefit of teletherapy. When a parent takes a leading role with the therapist for their child’s care, it helps them know where their child is at, and allows them to be more involved in reaching their goals.