Feel Good Story of the Week:  Harlem Globetrotters Recruits Boy with Down Syndrome

Fine Motor Research in the News: Research on a Collaborative Fine Motor Program

[Source: Your Therapy Source]

Nutrition in the News:  Higher Levels of Omega 3 Tied to Better Sleep in Kids  

[Source: Psych Central]

In a new Oxford study, children who took omega-3 DHA supplements for 16 weeks started sleeping nearly an hour longer each night and had fewer waking episodes.

The two-phased study analyzed thesleep of 362 healthy UK school children (ages seven to nine) in relation to their blood levels of omega-3 and omega-6 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA).

The child participants were not chosen for sleep problems, but rather because they were struggling readers at a mainstream primary school. Previous research has shown an association between poor sleep and low blood omega-3 LC-PUFA in infants and in children and adults with behavior or learning difficulties.

Collaborative Therapy in the News:  A Team Approach to Autism Diagnosis and Care  

[Source:  Medical News Today]

Improving diagnosis and treatment for individuals with autism has been the focus of a growing body of research. New information from these studies led the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to revise key parameters for evaluating and treating autism. Researchers led by Yale Child Study Center director Fred Volkmar, M.D., have published the new practice parameters in the Feb. issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

"Early diagnosis of children with autism spectrum disorders means treatments will be introduced that lead to more positive outcomes for children," said Volkmar the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology at the Yale School of Medicine.

Gender Research in the News:  Wishing to be Another Gender: Links to ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorders 

[Source:  Medical News Today]

Children and teenagers with an autism spectrum disorder or those who have attention deficit and hyperactivity problems are much more likely to wish to be another gender. So says John Strang of the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC, USA, leader of the first study to compare the occurrence of such gender identity issues among children and adolescents with and without specific neurodevelopmental disorders. The paper is published in Springer's journalArchives of Sexual Behavior.

Children between 6 and 18 years old were part of the study. They either had no neurodevelopmental disorder, or they were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a medical neurodevelopmental disorder such as epilepsy, orneurofibromatosis. The wish to be the other gender, known as gender variance, was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist, one of the most commonly used behavioral report inventories for children and adolescents.

Memory Research in the News:  Brain Structure Stores Memories By Time    

[Source: Psych Central]

New research shows that the part of the brain called the hippocampus stores memories by their 'temporal context' - what happened before and what came after.

"We need to remember not just what happened, but when," said Liang-Tien (Frank) Hsieh, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, Center for Neuroscience and first author on the study,

For the study, Hsieh and Charan Ranganath, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neuroscience, looked for hippocampus activity linked to particular memories.

PediaStaff Therapy Placement of the Week:  Speaking of Connecticut!  

Upcoming Events:  AOTA 2014: Baltimore, Maryland!  

This year, AOTA hopes you won't miss a beat and has created a  Conference App to help you choose from almost 900 educational sessions.  It looks like a great tool!

Make sure when you plan your schedule, you leave time to visit PediaStaff's Booth #837.   We have a super special giveaway this year that we are very excited about - the  "PediaStaff OT Thumball," created exclusively in a joint effort between Answers in Motion and PediaStaff - solely for the AOTA 2014 Convention.

Insta-REgram of the Week:  Shamrock Under Glass  

Book Feature:  The Zones of Regulation  

Book by Leah Kuypers, MA, OT, Autism Specialist

The Zones of Regulation is a curriculum geared toward helping students gain skills in consciously regulating their actions, which in turn leads to increased control and problem solving abilities. Using a cognitive behavior approach, the curriculum's learning activities are designed to help students recognize when they are in different states called "zones," with each of four zones represented by a different color. In the activities, students also learn how to use strategies or tools to stay in a zone or move from one to another. Students explore calming techniques, cognitive strategies, and sensory supports so they will have a toolbox of methods to use to move between zones. To deepen students' understanding of how to self-regulate, the lessons set out to teach students these skills: how to read others' facial 

Apps of the Week:  Four Apps for Articulation Practice by Erik X. Raj  

[Source:  Teachers with Apps]

Review by Nanette Cote, MA, CCC-SLP

Oh happy day! I am one, lucky speech pathologist because I have been testing out not one, but FOUR apps by the dynamic Erik X. Raj.   Both my school and private clients have been pretty fortunate too and many keep bugging me to break out my iPad. Like Erik's other app: I Dare You Articulation,  the four apps in this review target /s, z, r, l, sh, ch, th/. Let's take a look at the new gems on my iPad.

First up is the recently released: Secret Mission Articulation, a favorite among many. The most entertaining aspect of this app is the robot-like voice that states your secret mission message. This game plays like hangman, except you have unlimited opportunities to guess the letters in the secret message answer, which incidentally includes the target sound in the word position that you establish. My trigger happy friends quickly learned that their guesses were limitless, so many just hit all the alphabet letters without spending any time trying to guess the answer. This did not bode well for me, so I made up a rule that only ten letters could be selected when trying to guess the answer, and they 

Pinterest Pinboard of the Week:  April Fool's Day as Learning!  

April Fool's Day can be a great day for learning opportunities.   Great conversation can be enabled by discussing things that don't appear as they seem.  It can even parlay into a discussion about the difference between a harmless prank on a day like this, versus the kind of prank that is bullying.

Over the past couple of years we have collected a variety of family and kid friendly ideas for April Fool's Day that don't have to make anyone cry or feel stupid.   Check out our Pinboard just for April Fool's Day Ideas.  I especially like the idea of using idioms!