It's AOTA Time!  Hope we will get to meet you this weekend in Indianapolis.  Come see us at Booth #325 and take home a code for our brand new PediaStaff Therapy Tools App and a great giveaway from LessonPix!

Please enjoy this week's issue.  Since we are traveling this week, we have taken the liberty to feature a few stories and items that hit our blog and/or our social media sites earlier this month but for space reasons never got into the newsletter. 

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Have a great weekend and Take Care!

by: Kerry Peterson, MA, CCC-SLP, BCBA

 

Speech pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists often work together when treating children with autism spectrum disorders and other developmental delays.  As a speech therapist treating young children age birth to six, I often worked with an occupational or physical therapist in a co-treatment model.  We were able to target sensory processing, communication, and fine and gross motor skills through shared activities. We shared a basic understanding of each other's area of expertise and we valued each other's input.

 

It is less common to find a behavior analyst (BCBA) working directly and collaboratively with speech pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists toward unified goals.

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by: David W Hammer, MA CCC-SLP, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, PA of UPMC

  

Author's Note: I will be using the term "client" to refer to the children and adolescents in this article.  I feel this is a happy-medium between "patient" in a hospital setting and "student" in a school setting.]

 

As a practicing therapist for over 30 years, one of the most intriguing speech sound production disorders to me has been persistent "r" distortions.  While we are inclined to think of single sound errors as "mild" when referencing severity levels, a persistent "r" distortion, especially for adolescents who have been through years of therapy without success, is anything but "mild".  In the English language, unfortunately, this sound is so frequently occurring in consonantal and vocalic forms.  I have treated many older school-age children and adolescents with persistent "r" distortions over the years, and was asked to share some thoughts about how I approach this challenge and to provide therapy ideas that I have found successful.

 

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by Angela Hissong, DEd, OTR/L,CMCP

The celebration of April is Occupational Month has been a constant in my life since 1987; the year occupational therapy became my official career path.  This article will encourage occupational therapy practitioners to pause and take a moment to ponder their OT Core Story.  This encompasses how passion, nurturance, and advocacy fit into their journey within the occupational therapy.  From the first day occupational therapy found me, I have had a passion for the philosophy of engaging others in meaningful occupational to enhance, maintain, or find their well-being.  In 2009, as I sat in on my 15th Eleanor Clarke Slagle Lecture and listened to Dr. Swartz speak of OT's need to reclaim our heritage, I felt the passion for occupational therapy fill the room.  However, I knew from past experience that

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by Loren Shlaes, OTR/L

 

When to Begin Handwriting
The ability to write is one of the very highest levels of human achievement. Learning to write requires a great degree of fine motor control and visual motor coordination, along with sufficient attention span and frustration tolerance.  Forcing a child to learn to write before these underlying skills are solidly in place is counterproductive.

 

In New York City, where I practice, children are expected to be able to write at the age of four. In my clinical opinion, this is two full years before they are developmentally ready, and does more harm than good.  If a child does not yet have the internal strength and stability to perform such a high level task, in order to comply with the grownups demands, he is going to have to manufacture it by straining and contorting his body in a very unnatural way.  This sets him up for a lifetime of poor posture and bad habits.  

 

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By Ellen Kester PhD, CCC-SLP

 

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to Matagalpa, Nicaragua to serve as a speech-language pathologist on a medical mission with Austin Smiles.  Austin Smiles is an amazing organization that takes teams of surgeons, nurses, speech-language pathologists, and other helpers to do cleft lip and palate surgeries in developing countries.  The experience was incredible and I was amazed at what the team was able to accomplish in one short week, but I left thinking that we, as speech-language pathologists, have so much to do to spread the knowledge that we have attained in our field.

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[Source:  The Boston Globe]

 

On a recent Sunday, while Walt was baking gluten-free cookies, his mother had to remind him to check the recipe, put the eggs away, and close the refrigerator door. But he navigated the oven and timer just fine, and carefully used a spatula to shift the warm cookies from the baking sheet to the cooling rack.

 

A few minutes later, after a quick, reassuring hug, the 16-year-old resumed the scrapbook he had started that morning, printing out pictures of his favorite Theodore Tugboats, trimming them to fit, and labeling each one.

 

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[Source:  CNN]

CNN Editor's Note: Rob Gorski writes for "Lost and Tired," where he blogs about the reality of raising three boys on the autism spectrum. He and his wife, Lizze, have three boys, Gavin,12, Elliott, 6, and Emmett John, 3.

 

Canton, Ohio (CNN) - As the snow started falling, I drove to Giant Eagle to pick up some groceries. With a storm on the way, I needed to stock up on supplies in case we got snowed in.

I pulled into the parking lot of the store and found a spot right in front of the entrance. I sat there for a few minutes, collecting what I needed to take in.

 

As I reached over to the passenger seat to grab my wallet, I glanced over at the car next to me through the passenger window and saw three people who were loading their groceries into their car. I also saw a large man standing there, reaching over the hood of their car. He was wiping the snow and ice off the car's windshield with his bare hands.

 

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