Occupational Therapy Skills at Home

Occupational Therapy Skills at Home

Various skills are necessary for functional Independence. Note that, these change according to the age of the individuals. And yes, it is possible to learn Occupational Therapy skills at home, using everyday materials available. Occupational therapy in the home is a crucial subject to discuss. occupational therapy assistant work with clients of all ages to assist their everyday activities, thus it’s critical to incorporate OT interventions into the home environment. This blog post discusses how to create home programs for occupational therapy, how to encourage the achievement of OT goals at home, and how to implement activities for OT at home.

What makes occupational therapy necessary for kids?

When a child has an injury or illness that affects their development, pediatric occupational therapy is recommended. Some kids need therapy because they’re struggling to meet developmental milestones. Others may require the therapy because they are unable to perform activities that they used to be able to due to an injury or other ailment.

Occupational therapy for children in the pediatric setting is frequently used to treat:

• Prematurity
• Autism
• Down syndrome
• Dyslexia, dyscalculia, and other learning or sensory processing disorders
• Congenital cardiac disease
• Oral aversion/feeding disorders
• Plagiocephaly
• Fine motor issues
• Cerebral Palsy
• Cancer

Occupational therapy assistants and pediatric occupational therapists work with kids of various ages and developmental stages. They address the complete lifespan. Functional tasks need to be completed in a variety of locations, including schools, hospitals, outpatient clinics, the community, and other settings.

Every facet of daily life requires time commitment, and an occupational therapist (OT) may assist with these abilities. Considering that the home is a natural place to live, occupational therapy provided there follows a continuum of care. It serves as a location for self-care, clothing, eating, cleaning, and other ADLs (activities of daily living). Other facets of daily life, such as instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), also naturally occur in the home. Meal preparation, housekeeping, shopping, bill payment, medicine administration, laundry, and other duties are all considered IADLs. While these are part of daily life, they are not always tasks that are finished every day. But because they affect a person’s capacity to function, occupational therapy methods also address these.

Let us look at Occupational Therapy skills at home that facilitate meaningful interaction in work, play, and leisure activities. So what skills are we looking at?

To begin with:

Gross motor movements:

Occupational Therapy skills at home for Gross Motor training are abundantly received through:

• Running, climbing, jumping, kicking, crawling, creeping, animal walks
• Creeping can be done on road made of pillows, or a folded bedsheet, Remember, it provides excellent proprioceptive feedback. It is more fun while going under a chairs tunnel or a play tunnel. Make it as much fun as possible for maximum involvement.
• A ball in a sock tied to a string is a fantastic coordination and reaction time activity. Hit the ball correctly and duck to save yourself!
• Ride a scooter in standing, move between the obstacles of toys spread on the floor. Find your way!!

Fine motor skills at Home:

• Cutting atta dough and boiled spaghetti with a butter knife. Also, cutting of basic shapes and curves with scissors under parental guidance.
• For various grasps, like pencil grasp: placing and picking cards, cloth pins, tongs,
• Pincer grasp: by picking coins, using small tongs to pick beans
• Finger identification and isolation: puppet games, finger dabbing
• Tactile sensory play: foam squeezing, grains, shaving foam tracing, sensory tray-based activities

Read more about Motor skills here

Bilateral integration: 

Good bilateral integration shows that both sides of the brain are working well, communicating, interacting for meaningful interaction with the surroundings. Typically, bilateral integration happens when one hand stabilizes and the other hand mobilizes to work. An example is the use of scissors, crayons, painting, holding a stacker and putting the rings in, and so on. Good body awareness also contributes to good bilateral integration.

A) Bilateral Integration stimulation activities:

• Beading
• Lacing
• Coloring
• Paper tearing
• Sticking

B) For good body awareness:

• Imitation of body movements as shown by parents or siblings
• Performing animal walks
• Ball games catch and throw, kick, and fetch

Visual Skills:

Visual perception: it is a skill of the brain to make sense of what is seen by the eyes.

There are diverse types of visual perception skills:

• Form constancy is the ability to identify the same shape anywhere, even if they are different objects. Understanding a ball is a circle and an Idli is also a circle in shape
• Visual memory: It is the ability to remember something and recall soon after. For children, this ability helps with reading a word on the board and writing it in the book, without having to look at the board again.
• Visual-Spatial Relation: Understanding the orientation of alphabets is one example of spatial relation. This helps the child understand different alphabets like p, d
• Visual discrimination: It is the ability to identify minute differences of similar-looking objects. These include identifying different coins or identifying an orange from a sweet lime.
• Visual closure: this skill helps with identifying the object when only a part of the object is visible. This skill helps a child to identify books from the bag and toys from a drawer.
• Figure-ground: This skill helps a child to find a toy or socks from a stack of clothes.

Different activities for visual perception skills at home are:

• Join the dots on a board
• Find the hidden objects from a box
• Placing alphabets between two clay lines to understand the orientation
• Find all the circle shapes in the kitchen

Visual-Motor Coordination:

• Mazes
• Stacking glasses or blocks
• Water play, water through a funnel, from one glass to another
• Spraying water on a potted plant

Tactile tolerance:

At home, this is achieved during the use of flour play, dough play. Also, using natural colors like turmeric, beetroot to make colors to finger dab, in case a child is still mouthing. Then, cutting shapes, cutting dough rolls, helping shape cookies with cookie cutters help too. Activities like mashing a banana or a boiled potato, designs, or alphabets with boiled pasta provide an expanse of tactile inputs.

Proprioceptive difficulties:

It cause a child to appear clumsy, use less or more force, drop things often. A child finds it difficult to apply the right amount of pressure during any activity, be it writing or closing the doors.

Help a child with animal walks or take turns to jump across a rope.  Ask the child to jump out and in a hula hoop.

Activities of Daily Living:

Remember, these skills are best learned in a child’s natural habitat. Also, working on strengthening, body awareness, tactile tolerance, and visual perception helps a child excellently. This is because these skills relate to his writing abilities. Improved hand use is observed while dressing as also crossing midline to scratch, dress, comb.

Eye-hand coordination activities like target games will eventually help with self-feeding too. Thus we saw, how, many OT skills can be learned at home through an array of activities. Get in touch with us here if you think we can help your child.

What Distinctions Exist Between Occupational and Physical Therapy?

There are distinctions between occupational therapy and physical therapy in terms of how they enhance children’s quality of life. PT, or physical therapy, assists with:

• pain intensity range of motion of the joint
• perseverance
• Gross motor abilities refer to the ability to move large muscles using the arms, legs, feet, or full body.

Occupational therapy provides assistance with:

• Fine motor abilities are the ability to move small muscles in the hands, fingers, and toes, like gripping.
• visual-perceptual abilities
• cognitive abilities (thinking)
• issues with sensory processing

Visit the 1Specialplace Blog for Additional Occupational Therapy Activities and Inspiration!

With any luck, these activities will encourage you to include more occupational therapy to your kids’ everyday routines at home. They are therapeutic goals in mind and will not only be enjoyable for your child, but they may also help youngsters with autism and other conditions. See the 1Specialplace blog for more of our top toys and activities that have been recommended by therapists.