 |
April 29, 2016
Issue 18, Volume 9
It's All About the Choices!
Greetings and Happy Friday!
Please enjoy our weekly newsletter!
News Items
-
Just Like Human Skin, This Plastic Sheet Can Sense And Heal
-
More Students Entering School Without Fine Motor Skills
-
Nurturing During Preschool Years Boosts Child Brain Growth
- Music Exposure Benefits Babies' Brains
-
GI Problems in Autism may Originate in Genes, Study Suggests
- Could Bacteria Cause Some Anorexia Cases?
PediaStaff News and Hot Jobs
- Pediatric Occupational Therapist/OT Job - Annapolis, MD
- Hot Job!! Part-time School-Based OT - Jarrell, TX
- Hot Jobs! School-Based SLPs for San Antonio, TX
- Hot Jobs! School Based SLP, Throughout Washington State
Therapy Activities, Tips and Resources
- Feelings Mandala Activity
- Book Review: Barefoot and Balanced
- 12 Mexican Crafts for Cinco de Mayo
- App of the Week: Monkey Spot!
Articles and Special Features
- PT Corner: Pros and Cons of Pediatric Mobility Equipment
- OT Corner: Pediatric OT's Role in Helping Grandkids Understand Dementia
- SLP Corner: Teaching Verbs... with Trains!
- School Psych Corner: What Changes When a School Embraces Mindfulness?
- School Nurse's Corner: The Safe Snack Guide
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.
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.
|
|
|
|
|
Just Like Human Skin, This Plastic Sheet Can Sense And Heal
|
[Source: NPR.org]
Artificial limbs have come a long way since the days of peg legs and hooks for hands. But one thing most of these prosthetics lack is a sense of touch.
Zhenan Bao intends to change that.
Bao is a chemical engineer at Stanford University. Her long-term goal is to make an artificial skin out of plastic that can do most - if not all - of the things real skin can do.
Skin is pretty remarkable stuff. It keeps dangerous bacteria and germs out and our innards in. It's flexible, it can sense when we touch things and it can heal itself when cut.
Read the Rest of This Article Through a Link on our Blog
|
|
More Students Entering School Without Fine Motor Skills
|
Editor's Note: Thanks to Penny Appelbaum Goldman for sharing this troubling article on the Pediatric OT Facebook Group. This is an EXCELLENT group.. If you are not in it, I definitely recommend you join it!
[Source: Lancaster Online via Pedatric OT Group on FB]
As art teacher Alisa Leidich sends four vertical lines marching across an oversize drawing pad in paradelike formation, 20 kindergartners put their hands to paper and try their best to mimic her.
It's not as easy as it might seem.
Local teachers and occupational therapists say an increasing number of children are showing up for kindergarten without the fine motor skills needed to grip a marker, hold their paper still while coloring or cut and glue shapes.
Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog |
|
Nurturing During Preschool Years Boosts Child Brain Growth
|
[Source: Science Daily]
New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates children with supportive mothers during preschool experience a more significant increase in the volume of the hippocampus during the period from school age to adolescence. In contrast, kids whose mothers were less supportive during the preschool years had a less steep growth trajectory, even if their mothers became more supportive later. The researchers measured support and nurturing by monitoring and scoring videotaped interactions between mothers and their children.
Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog |
|
Music Exposure Benefits Babies' Brains
|
[Source: Medical News Today]
Early music training can help children to develop a wide range of perceptual skills, and it may help them as they learn to speak, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Previous research has indicated that music training when young can improve infants' ability to process musical sounds and speech.
Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog |
|
GI Problems in Autism may Originate in Genes, Study Suggests
|
[Source: Medical News Today]
Credit: Kara Gross Margolis, M.D., and Michael Gershon, M.D., Columbia University Medical Center
Maps of colon contractions in wild type mice (left) compared to the autism model mice (right). Intestinal motility in the model mice was abnormally slow.
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have found evidence in mice that, for some types of autism, gastrointestinal difficulties may originate from the same genetic changes that lead to the behavioral and social characteristics of the condition. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog |
|
Could Bacteria Cause Some Anorexia Cases?
|
[Source: Care 2. com]
Anorexia is a well known eating disorder, but
the causes of this condition aren't fully understood.
In the journal, Medical Hypothesis,
researchers from the U.K.'s Lancaster University say they believe anorexia nervosa, as well as conditions like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), may share an underlying autoimmune issue that probably links to bacterial infection.
Currently, anorexia is often thought to result from a combination of factors. Women tend to be more susceptible, though how much this is related to underlying genetic factors remains unclear. Environmental and social pressures, like the close scrutiny society gives to women's bodies, may also be at play.
Read the Rest of this Article Through a Link our Blog |
|
Hot Job!: Pediatric Occupational Therapist/OT Job - Annapolis, MD
|
We have a great position for an Occupational Therapist with a clinic provider of Physical Therapy, Aquatic Therapy, Speech Therapy and Occupational Therapy, who has serviced the families of Anne Arundel County for over ten years. They are located about 15 minutes north of Annapolis, 25 minutes south of the Baltimore metro area. We need someone to start as soon as possible!
Ideal schedule for a candidate would be: Mon 9-6; Tues 11-8; Wed 11-8; Thurs 9-6; Fri- Every other Friday from 9-5
Learn About / Apply for This Job on our Blog |
|
Hot Job!: Part-time School-Based OT - Jarrell, TX
|
We have a fabulous part-time school position west of Jarrell, TX for an Occupational Therapist for the full school year 2016-2017. This position is for 1 to 2 days per week, likely about 15 hours per week, and the district can be flexible with which days.
* The therapist will work closely with the ARD committee and be a support to them. In addition to providing direct service, he or she also will consult with teachers
* The district has a skilled PT on staff who the therapist will work closely with, but there is no other OT on staff
* OT will work mainly with elementary aged students, and the caseload is small, with about ten kids on it. Some students have high needs and more involved physical disabilities
Learn About / Apply for This Job on our Blog |
|
Hot Jobs!: School-Based SLPs for San Antonio, TX
|
|
Come join our team of over 80 therapist and assistants in the Alamo City....San Antonio, Texas! This progressive multi-cultural city offers theme parks, the River Walk, professional and college sports, an abundance of outdoor activities, multiple shopping experiences, a variety of food and cultures...but most of all....WARM Weather year-round! Best of all is that you would be working as a contract Speech-Language Pathologist in the local public schools so you won't be involved in ancillary duties like hall duty, bus duty, lunchroom duty, etc! Just Speech Pathology.
Learn About / Apply for This Job on our Blog |
|
Hot Job!: School Based SLP, Throughout Washington State
|
Are you considering a school-based position in WA state for SY 2015/17??
We have a variety of great locations to choose from, including these:
Yakima, WA: Secure this job now for SY16/17 and enjoy your summer! PediaStaff has opportunities for SLPs in Yakima, WA starting in the Fall of 2016. If you kayak, bike, climb mountains, hike or ride horses when it's warm, or do snow sports when it's cold, you'll love it here in the Yakima valley.
Learn About / Apply for These Jobs on our Blog |
|
Feelings Mandala Activity
|
[Source: The Art of Social Work]
This is a simple intervention to explore emotions with children.
- Simply print off a variety of mandalas and allow the child to choose one to color.
- Ask the child to list the feelings they typical have below or above the mandala and draw a small circle next to each feeling.
- Have the child pick a color for each feeling and fill in the circles with the colors to use a guide to remember which colors belong to which feelings.
- Invite the child to color the mandala with the feelings color to show how often they have the feelings. For example, "Now you can start coloring. "If there is a feeling you have a lot of in your life, color more of the picture with that color. If there is a feeling you don't notice having very much, only color a little of the picture with that color."
|
|
|
[Source: Can Do Kiddo]
I get asked ALL.THE.TIME. for my recommendations of learning apps for babies and toddlers. Hands-on play is the best learning app, and the the perfect classroom for that learning right outside your back door. So if you arrived here hoping to get the names of apps for your devices, I'm sorry to disappoint. But I hope you'll stick around to read a really valuable interview with Angela Hanscom, MOT, OTR/L about why she agrees that nature is the best learning app for your kiddo.
Read the Rest of this Review Through a Link on our Blog |
|
12 Mexican Crafts for Cinco de Mayo
|
[Source: Woo Junior]
With Cinco de Mayo right around the corner, I wanted to put together a good set of kids Mexican crafts. These would also be awesome to help children celebrate Mexican Independence Day!
Get These Great Read Ideas Through a Link on our Blog |
|
|
[Source: Speech Techie]
Scavenger hunts make for great speech and language activities as they require students to work with categories, use descriptive language, problem solve (and therefore use critical language forms such as because, so, if/then) and work together.
Monkey Spot i
s a unique app, using the iOS camera as the means to capture a number of items on themed lists (note that for now this is an iPhone app only, but it can be installed on iPads, so use the link or change your app store search filter to look for iPhone apps). The app contains 7 free hunts that include several that could be done in a school setting (additional hunts
Read More About this App Through a Link on our Blog |
|
|
|
|
PT Corner:
Pros and Cons of Pediatric Mobility Equipment
|
[Source: Advance for Occupational Therapy]
Pediatric Mobility
Perhaps no other practice area incorporates the use of adapted equipment as much as the pediatric school setting. Many children with special needs and physical disabilities use a variety of adapted chairs, stationary standers, gait trainers, and manual and power wheelchairs to improve their overall function and access the educational environment.
|
|
OT Corner:
Ped OT's Role in Helping Kids Understand Dementia
|
[Source: Seniors Flourish]
As an occupational therapist helping older adults with dementia, we come into contact with many family's caring for their parents. These caregivers are also known as the "sandwich generation" because they are not only taking care of their parents, but also raising their own kids.
Our role as occupational therapists are
are to #1. provide services for our patients, but also #2. provide caregiver education, which includes helping the entire family understand the processes of disease, stress relief strategies and education in the physical aspects of caregiving.
|
|
SLP Corner:
Teaching Verbs... with Trains!
|
[Source: Crazy Speech World]
I have found myself having to teach verbs so much this year...more than normal. Some of my students with language impairments are having such a hard time with regular past tense, not even the cursed irregular, that I started from square one. I acquired this Super Duper book and it really breaks it down to the nitty gritty, which my kids have needed. In addition to this resource, I needed a little hands on activity, so I came up with this one!
Read the Rest of This Article on our Blog
|
|
School Psych Corner:
What Changes When a School Embraces Mindfulness?
|
[Source: Mind Shift]
It was lunch time at Marysville School in Southeast Portland when the fire broke out. Teachers quickly herded their students out of the building to the sports field behind the school as the old colonial-style building burned. The fire that traumatized students and staff alike was in 2009, when Lana Penley was in her second year as principal.
The 460 students and 50 staff members of the K-8 school relocated to a vacant school building in another part of Portland, displaced from their school site for three years as the district rebuilt the Marysville building.
|
|
School Nursing Corner:
The Safe Snack Guide
|
[Source: Snack Safely.com]
The Safe Snack Guide is an invaluable resource for your home or classroom.
Manufacturers change their processes and labeling all the time. When we learn about these changes, we issue product advisories
and sometimes remove items from the Guide that we deem may no longer be safe.
Download the Safe Snack Guide 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.
|
|
|
