Occupational Therapy

We have started Occupational Therapy for Max.  The original goal we had talked about working on was to be his sensory needs surrounding food/eating.  He's always displayed hyperactivity and lack of being able to focus, jumping from one thing to the next.  But the past little while its as if someone put the spin cycle on high in his brain!  haha. He can walk in to a room and you can see he is overwhelmed by everything and he doesn't know where to begin.  It's like he is trying to beat the clock and get through everything before time runs out.  He will grab an item, dump it out, look at it for a second and move on to the next.  He can clutter a room faster than you can say clutter!  haha

So, upon walking in to the room with the Therapist, she quickly noticed how Max moved about the room trying to make sure he experienced everything in it, in under 5 seconds.  So we changed his goals to work on his attention and get him to focus on something for a certain time frame.

She gave me this great tool to use at home.  Each day I have him pick out 3 or 4 different toys/activity and we put them in the order he wants to play with them.  The goal is to get him to focus on said toy/activity for at least 5 min or 5 turns.  At the end of each min/turn, he moves down one star until he has moved all 5.  Then we can either continue playing with that toy/activity, or move on to the next thing he has chosen and start again.

We've only been at this for a short time now and I have to keep bringing him back to the current toy/activity but it's a baby step in the right direction.. :)

Here's a good website to read more about what Occupational Therapy is and how it can help.  http://kidshealth.org/parent/system/ill/occupational_therapy.html#