November 6, 2015
Issue 44, Volume 8
It's All About the Choices!     
          
Greetings and Happy Friday!

Please enjoy our weekly newsletter offering
 
News Items:
  • Divorce Rate Doesn't Go Up as Families of Children with Disabilities Grow
  • Study: Children's Self-Esteem Already Established by Age Five
  • San Fran Schools Implement Meditation and Success / Happiness Soars
  • Language May Be Shaped by Climate and Terrain
  • Children's Trust of Each Other Depends on Relationship
  • Agreeing on a Definition of Curiousity
Hot Jobs 
  • PediaStaff Placement of the Week: OT in West Suburban Boston
  • Itinerant School based Speech-Language Pathologist/SLP Job - Barrow, AK
  • School Contract Physical Therapist - Anacortes, WA
Therapy Activities, Tips and Resources
  • Modifications/ Interventions to Help Children Sit Still in the Classroom
  • Pinterest Pin of the Week: Doily Turkey Craft
  • Thanksgiving 'Would You Rather' Questions
  • App of the Week:  Toca Live Town App - Gone Free 
Articles and Special Features 
  • SLP Corner: Choose Articulation Therapy Activities that Lead to Quick Dismissals
  • PT Corner: Incorporating Movement Into Calendar Time
  • OT Corner: 20 Things You Never Knew About Being Left-Handed
  • Autism Corner: Help for Depressed Teens on the Autism Spectrum
  • Technology Corner: Tech Tools That Have Transformed Learning With Dyslexia

Feel free to contact us with any questions about our openings or items in these pages. Have you discovered our RSS feed? Click on the orange button below to subscribe to all our openings and have them delivered to your Feed Reader!  Don't have an RSS Feed Reader set up? Sign up at Blogtrottr and have our blog posts delivered right to your email.

Have a great weekend and Take Care!

Heidi Kay and the PediaStaff Team





The Career Center

The links to the right are "live" and reflect the most recent SLP, OT, PT and related assistant jobs, and ALL our Bilingual and School Psychology Jobs. 
Girl
To further narrow your search by state,
setting, bilingual, or term, use the
check boxes drop down menus.

If a particular search is returning
no hits it is possible that we do
not currently have new openings for
you with that selection criteria.

To see ALL our openings
click
HERE and further narrow your search.
Recent Occupational Therapist and COTA Jobs 

Divorce Rate Doesn't Go Up as Families of Kids w/ Disabilities Grow
[Source: Medical News Today]

Couples raising a child with developmental disabilities do not face a higher risk of divorce if they have larger families, according to a new study by researchers from the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
 
The study, published in the American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, also compares divorce rates of couples who have at least one child with a developmental disability to that of their peers who have typically developing children.
 
Researchers found that among couples with children without any disabilities, the risk of divorce was lowest for couples with one child and increased with each successive child. In contrast, the risk of divorce for parents of children with developmental disabilities remained unchanged with increasing family size.

 Read the Rest of This Article Through a Link on our Blog
Study: Children's Self-Esteem Already Established by Age Five
[Source: Medical X-Press]
 
By age 5 children have a sense of self-esteem comparable in strength to that of adults, according to a new study by University of Washington researchers.
 
Because self-esteem tends to remain relatively stable across one's lifespan, the study suggests that this important personality trait is already in place before children begin kindergarten.|}
 
"Our work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense their selves," said lead author Dario Cvencek, a research scientist at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog
San Fran Schools Implement Meditation.  Success / Happiness Soars
[Source:  Inhabitots.com]
 
We've seen yoga, standing desks and vegetarian lunches turn troubled schools around, but we've never seen meditation adopted successfully within the school system. Until now. According to reports, several San Francisco middle and high schools, as well as scattered schools around the Bay Area, have adopted what they call, "Quiet Time" - a stress-reduction meditation strategy that is doing wonders for students and teachers. The first school to adopt the Quiet Time practice in 2007, Visitacion Valley Middle School, has reaped huge rewards. Formally a school largely out of control, Visitacion

 Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog
Human Language May Be Shaped by Climate and Terrain
[Source:  Science Magazine]
 
By Emily Underwood
 
Why does the Hawaiian language flow melodically from vowel to vowel, whereas Hungarian is peppered with consonants? It may have something to do with the climate and terrain where those languages developed, a new study of more than 600 languages from around the world suggests.
Previous research has shown that some other species' vocalizations are shaped by their environment. Birds such as the song sparrow, for example, sing at higher pitches in cities, where lower frequency notes would be drowned out by urban noise. And birds living in forested areas tend to sing at lower frequencies than birds living in open spaces, 

Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog
Children's Trust of Each Other Depends on Relationship
[Source Medical News Today]

"Mom! He splashed me on purpose!" "No I didn't - it was an accident!" Arguments over whether one sibling intended to harm another are a common soundtrack for parents with more than one kid. New research from Concordia University in Montreal shows that some children are more likely than others to believe that their brother or sister is deliberately trying to harm them.
 
The results have important implications. "Regularly attributing hostile intent to a sibling can signal a deeper problem," says Holly Recchia, assistant professor in the Department of Education.
 
How kids relate to their brother or sister can affect other social interactions. "Low-quality relationships between siblings have been linked to aggression and violence, which are in turn related to a host of harmful outcomes, including depression, anxiety and behavioural problems like delinquency," Recchia says.

Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog
Agreeing on a Definition of Curiousity
[Source:  Medical X-Press]

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes called it "the lust of the mind." Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt said it was "the most useful gift." And, yes, we all know what killed the cat. But ask a group of scientists to define curiosity and you'll get a rousing debate, and a lot of unanswered questions about its biology. No more, argue two University of Rochester researchers in a review of curiosity science published November 4 in Neuron. They propose that it's time for researchers to organize and focus on curiosity's function, evolution, mechanism, and development.

 Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog
PediaStaff  Placement of the Week:  OT in West Suburban Boston
Congratulations to Jillian N., on her new position at our outpatient client in West Suburban, Boston.
This was some nice staff collaboration internally, as Vicki in our California office initially heard about this position through her local client and she sent the lead to Lauren who handles Massachusetts, who then identified Jillian for the job!

Congrats Jillian and Hooray for PediaStaff teamwork!
If you are looking for a life changing experience as a Speech-Language Pathologist then look no further. Our client has a need for a Speech Therapist to travel to Alaska 9 times throughout school year 2016-2017.  The area is very rural.  All of your travel expenses would be paid as well as a day rate for each day of service to the districts.  Pay is based on speech experience.

Previous school based experience or a strong background is preferred but they will accept a strong new grad.  You will have to apply for an Alaska license.  You'll have access to other therapists within the schools, but will need to be pretty confident in your skills and able to work independently.

Learn About / Apply for This Job on our Blog
Boating, hiking, camping, kayaking, biking, all right outside your back door.  Other people take their vacations here, we'll pay you to live here for 9 months

PediaStaff has a full time school PT contract opening in Anacortes, Washington.  You'll work with a variety of cases, and kids from preK to age 21.

Qualifications: Must hold appropriate Degree in Physical Therapy and a current WA state license.  Note that it can take 2+ months to obtain a WA state license so interested candidates should already have license applied for.

Learn About / Apply for This Job on our Blog
OT Activity of Week: Ideas to Help Children Sit Still in the Classroom
[Source: Your Therapy Source]
 
The Summer/Fall survey results have been posted.  Read all about the modifications and interventions that work best according to over 150 pediatric occupational and physical therapists to help students sit still in the classroom.  Based on 175 responses, the #1 intervention to help students sit still was having the teacher incorporate movement into lesson plans.

Read the Rest of This Article Through a Link on our Blog
Pinterest Pin of the Week: Doily Turkey Craft  
Editor's Note:  I am loving this for following directions, scissor and folding practice, and even articulation trials with the dauber pen!

[Source:  I Heart Crafty Things]

Learn More About this Adorable Craft Through a Link on our Blog
Editor's Note:  These are terrific for Speech and Language Therapy!  Love Rachel's stuff!

Download This Nice Freebie Through a Link on our Blog
[Source: OTs with Apps & Technology]

Toca Boca apps are favorites for their quality content and engagement for teachers and for kids. One of their new Life Series apps, Toca Life: Town   has gone free for iOS (regularly 2.99). Available also for  Android   (2.99),  Kindle Fire   (2.99) and Windows mobile devices  (.99), this fun app is great for play, language, exploring or as a reward for completing a task in therapy.  I'm not a huge curator of just for fun apps, but one of my students will love this app and having incentives for work completion is always helpful!

Download This Free App Through a Link on our Blog
SLP Corner: Artic Therapy Activities that Lead to Quick Dismissals
[Source: The Bilinguistics Blog]
 
In our last post, we talked how making your SLP-efforts cumulative helps you be a more effective, efficient, and happier SLP. Check out the post  here if you missed it. Today, we are going to talk about how one articulation method can:
 
1. Get students to generalize their sounds and graduate from speech therapy quicker.
2. Decrease your caseload and earn you more time to tackle your other SLP responsibilities.


PT Corner: Incorporating Movement Into Calendar Time
[Source:  Pink Oatmeal]
 
As a physical therapist we use numbers all the time.  We count reps all the time.  In school we will do warm-ups where we incorporate counting.  I made cards with numbers 1-30 in the past to make warm-ups more fun than just counting.  I let the kids pick their cards and and we perform the action on the card associated with the number. Thanks to some great feedback from teachers that have used my cards, I've learned that they have been using them at their calendar time as a way of moving.


OT Corner:   20 Things You Never Knew About Being Left-Handed
[Source: Huffington Post]
 
by Amanda MacMillan
 
With just 10% of the population being left-handed, it can be easy for everyone else to forget we're living in a right-handed world. But aside from making it tough to cut a straight line with a pair of scissors designed for righties, being a southpaw can also have some subtle effects on our physical and mental health. The brains and bodies of lefties may operate differently than those of right-handed people (and in mixed-handed people, who may have different dominant hands for different tasks). "Handedness seems to be determined very early on in fetal development, when a lot of other things about your future are being determined as well," says Ronald Yeo, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Texas-Austin. Here's a look at some of the most common facts about being left-handed, and what it might really mean for your health.

Read the Rest of This Article on our Blog

Autism Corner: Help for Depressed Teens on the Autism Spectrum
Editor's Note: Great Article to give to the parents and guardians of your secondary school students with autism

Teens with Asperger's (AS) and High-Functioning Autism (HFA) are particularly vulnerable to mental health problems (e.g., depression, anxiety). One study found that 65% of their sample of patients with AS presented with symptoms of a psychiatric disorder. However, the inability of AS and HFA teens to communicate feelings of distress can also mean that it is often very difficult to diagnose depression. Likewise, because of their impairment in non-verbal expression, they may not appear to be depressed. This can mean that it is not until depression is well developed that it is recognized (e.g., in the form of aggression, alcoholism/drug abuse, increased obsessional behavior, paranoia, refusal to go to school/work/college, refusal to leave home, threatened /attempted/actual suicide, and total withdrawal).
Tech Corner:  Transforming Learning With Dyslexia with Technology
[Source: MindShift]
 
Fifth-grade teacher Kyle Redford remembers with emotion the day she unwittingly put an iPad in the hands of one of her 10-year-old dyslexic students, a day she called "a complete game changer."
 
While the rest of the class was working in a writers workshop, she handed the student an iPad and told him to try and experiment with its speech-to-text feature. With minimal expectations, Redford figured that the newness and the boy's curiosity would at least keep him busy during writing time, which he usually found frustrating.

Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link on our Blog

Did You Get This From a Friend?

 

Sign Up For Your Copy of This Newsletter!

Would you like pediatric and school-based therapy tips, resources, articles, and news delivered to your computer once a week? Sign up here for our newsletter!

Sign up HERE
Quick Links to PediaStaff
If you would like to opt out of receiving this newsletter, there is a link located in the footer below. However, please note that once you've opted out, we will be unable to send you any future correspondence via newsletter.
Please Note:  The views and advice expressed in articles, videos and other pieces published in this newsletter are not necessarily the views and advice of PediaStaff or its employees but rather that of the author.  PediaStaff is not endorsing or implying agreement with the views or advice contained therein, rather presenting them for the independent analysis and information of its readers.