Sensory processing can be the underlying issue of many functional problems in everyday life. Jean A Ayres’ model of development explains that sensory processing and integration are essential for effective development. The levels of development are:
Dyspraxia (Motor Planning challenges) is a neurological disorder that affects an individual's ability to plan and process motor tasks. Unfortunately, there is no clear definition of dyspraxia that enables it to be applied consistently,meaning it is often applied in different ways by different groups. The OT’s at Tyack Health believe that dyspraxia is when the body doesn’t ‘listen’ to the brain, people with dyspraxia has difficulty to navigate in this world. We provide specific therapy intervention and practical strategies to develop praxis and to help children and adults in their daily life.
Emotional self-regulation or regulation of emotion is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed.
Play is the work of children. It consists of those activities performed for self-amusement that have behavioral, social, and psychomotor rewards. It is child-directed, and the rewards come from within the individual child; it is enjoyable and spontaneous. Play is the direct opposite of work; it is frivolous. It provides freedom and invites the impulse to engage in foolishness. Yet it provides a means for ego development and a process by which social skills and physical skills develop as well. Different conditions impact on the child’s ability to play and to learn through play. The OT’s at Tyack Health assess the child’s ability to play and provide intervention and strategies to encourage typical play.
Visual motor integration is the ability to coordinate visual information with motor output and visual perception is the ability to recognise, recall, discriminate and make sense of what we see. Both are underlying components of catching a ball, forming letters properly between lines, reading and cutting on lines.
Working memory is a system for temporarily storing and managing the information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. Working Memory is the thinking skill that focuses on memory-in-action: the ability to remember and use relevant information while in the middle of an activity. For example, a child is using their Working Memory as they recall the steps of a recipe while cooking a favourite meal. Children who have trouble with their Working Memory skills will often have difficulty remembering their teachers’ instructions, recalling the rules to a game, or completing other tasks that involve actively calling up important information.
Attention and concentration are terms used to describe the complex mental processes that allow us to notice things and to take in information from the world around us. Paying attention is like focusing the spotlight of a torch in the dark. One can pay attention to several activities at any given time. When one is concentrating hard on an activity, he becomes oblivious of his surroundings as a player in a sporting activity or a musician trying to make a new tune or melody. The process of paying attention for any length of time on an activity or object is referred to as concentration.
