Occupational Therapists work to improve fine motor/perceptual skills, visual motor abilities, play & self care skills, motor planning, sensory registration, and handwriting skills. Pediatric Occupational Therapists are concerned with analyzing your child’s ability to perform in everyday tasks. Goals are to improve the child’s functional performance and to enhance the child’s ability to interact within the physical and social environments.

Occupational Therapists collaborate with families, teachers and caregivers of children with special needs, environments, interaction styles or materials to promote skill development. The following is a brief description of targeted skill areas: Fine Motor Skills: Skills related to the small muslces of the body, particularly those of the hands. Children require adequate dexterity, strength and coordination to manage a variety of tools and objects in their daily routine. Improve and train with use of writing utensils, scissors and eating utensils.

Visual Motor Skills: These skills are the integration of visual perception and fine/gross motor skill. Children have difficulty with visual motor skills will often have trouble learning how to print or write, as they have with copying information.

Cognition and Problem Solving: Cognitive ability is required to learn skills in all performance areas to include self-care, play and school. These skills underline the child’s ability to perceive, attend to, and learn about the environment.

Sensory Integration: The organization of sensory input for use. The “use” may be a perception of the world, an adaptive response, or a learning process. Through sensory integration, the many parts of the nervous system work together so that a child can interact with the environment effectively and experience appropriate satisfaction.

Physical Therapists work on developing gross motor skills, balance, coordination, strength and endurance. The goal of pediatric physical therapy is to assist children with special needs in achieving their maximum potential. Pediatric physical therapists are specially trained to work with a wide range of orthopedic and neurological conditions. realization of a child’s full potential is accomplished through the implementation of a treatment program designed to address each child’s unique concerns.

Speech-Language Pathologists are the professionals who identify, assess, and treat speech and language problems. They work to improve language and speech skills, articulation, fluency and voice, oral motor skills, feeding and/or swallowing, auditory processing and pragmatic skills. Following are details:

Pre-Language Skills: This refers to eye contact, gestural communication, facial expressions, babbling, imitation and other nonverbal communication methods that emerge before verbal communication.

Language: Language is broken down into two components -- Receptive and Expressive. Receptive refers to the child’s understanding of what is said to him/her. Receptive language generally precedes expressive language. Expressive language refers to the words and gestures that a child uses.

Articulation: This refers to the speech production of all the sounds within a language. Children acquire sounds along a developing continuum, with certain sounds being acquired as late as age 8. When the child has difficulty producing specific sounds it can greatly affect speech intelligibility and lead to frustration from not being understood.

Oral Motor Skills: This refers to the strength and coordination of facial and mouth muscles for speech and feeding. Children with oral motor disorders may exhibit drooling, poor control of food while eating, and problems with speech.

Feeding/Swallowing: Children with feeding and swallowing disorders may exhibit symptoms such as food/liquid falling from mouth, difficulty chewing, difficulty with bottle feeding and/or nursing, aversions to certain textures or flavors or even refusal to consume a variety of foods.

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1811 NE 146th Street

North Miami, Florida 33181

Phone:(305) 949-4191 Fax:(305) 949-4833

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