Occupational Therapy provides people with the skills for living. It focuses on enabling the person to participate in the purposeful and meaningful activities that they want, need and are expected to do.

In paediatric occupational therapy, we aim to allow our clients to develop their independence in many everyday tasks!

 

• Self-care skills: Involve skills such as using a knife and fork, tying shoelaces, fastening buttons and dressing. 

• Play skills: Are those that are used in everyday play, such as grasping skills, using balls, using puzzles, and skills for sport and playground play.

• Tool use: Involves handwriting skills (speed, legibility, pencil grip, reducing pain and/or fatigue), drawing, cutting, on-task classroom behaviour, task completion and craft skills.

• Gross motor skills: Involve the large muscles of the body that are important for major body movement such as walking, jumping, throwing a ball and sitting upright.

• Fine motor skills: Involve coordinating the small muscles of parts of the body such as the hand (usually in co-ordination with the eyes), to enable manipulation of and control over materials and tools. Fine motor skills are used in activities such as handwriting, dressing, feeding and using scissors.

• Visual perception:  Involves understanding what is being seen. Visual perception is highly important in completing many activities, such as reading a story, completing a puzzle, identifying letters and numbers, copying and writing.

• Sensory processing: Involves the way the body processes and reacts to the information it receives from the surrounding environment. Children may demonstrate over or under sensitivity to certain sensations such as loud noises or certain items of clothing; sensation seeking behaviour, such as chewing on things or enjoying being spun repetitively; and difficulty maintaining a calm state.