Listening with your whole body is a concept used in schools to teach what “active listening” looks like for students by demonstrating an attentive listening posture. It assumes that a child’s body is working well for them but they just need more support to follow the listening rules and routines of the classroom. But we…
Preparing for Peaceful Mealtimes
Tips for Peaceful Family Mealtimes Tip One: Never force your child to eat or clean their plate, bargain, punish, threaten, reward, coax, negotiate, or strongly encourage your child to eat. By doing this, you are setting yourself up for a show down with your child and making extra work for yourself. Tip Two: Ignore refusals,…
Essential Foundations of Fine Motor Skills
As a parent, when you bump into a fellow parent at the community center or local Starbucks, you may find yourself sharing about your child’s firsts…the first time he/she sat up or walked, spoke his/her first words…but not often when your child first held a block or grabbed a Cheerio with a fine pincer grasp….
Essential Foundations of Fine Motor Skills: Activities for Home
Vision Play Ball! Start by throwing a large ball to and from your child, and progress to smaller balls as able. When playing board games, present cards high, low, left, and right to encourage looking and reaching. Using Easels and LARGE paper/posters, create a connect the dot picture or place a vertical column of stickers/images…
Scoop on Praxis and Executive Function
What is the Difference Between Praxis and Executive Function? Could a Person have Difficulties with Both? Executive function is a general umbrella term used to describe a variety of cognitive skills involving self-regulation, mental control of behavior/decision-making, attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, forward thinking, planning and organization. Dr. Teresa-May Benson, a well known researcher in…
Oral Praxis
My child can’t spit out their toothpaste or suck from a straw! What can I do? Have you ever noticed your child has difficulty moving food from one side of their mouth to the other, can’t spit out their toothpaste, and can’t suck from a straw? have you noticed they don’t pucker their lips when…
The Praxis of Handwriting
Does handwriting impact the learning process in school? Absolutely! With handwriting becoming obsolete after learning to write in Kindergarten the focus on written communication in school has been for students to become more proficient with the keyboard. With the COVID Pandemic, children rushed full speed into a digital world, some of them missing out on…
Dysgraphia, More Than Just Bad Handwriting
“I can’t write! It hurts my hand! I hate writer’s workshop! I’m never going to be a good writer!” Do you know a child like this? Doesn’t it make your heart sink, seeing how that child’s academic challenges are tied so closely to their self esteem and sense of self? Can you imagine that child’s…
Is it really ADHD?
Does my child have ADHD? During a parent teacher conference a teacher shared with a parent that her child has some of the behaviors associated with the diagnosis- looking around the room, having a hard time concentrating on work, being off task ( eg. getting a drink, going to the bathroom, staring out the window),…
Sensory Processing & Behavior: Is there something else going on?
Have you ever been told that your child is frequently “off-task” at school or appears to be “not listening”? When you talk to your child about this, he/she responds by saying “I hate school” “I don’t want to go” or “It was Joey’s fault.” Reward and motivation charts don’t seem to work and the teacher…
