OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY

The mission of the Occupational Therapy Department is to improve or restore OPTIMUM LEVELS OF FUNCTION for students at Accotink Academy within the school environment, home environment, and in the community. We accomplish this by minimizing the student's disability or disabilities, providing opportunities to succeed in a least restrictive environment, and adapting the environment to assist in compensating for dysfunction or impairments while providing a safe therapeutic learning environment.

Therapeutic intervention is provided through individual consultation with parents and educational staff and group formats. The areas of specialty, which the Occupational Therapist at Accotink Academy provide service for, but is not limited to, are:

• Gross motor skill development (i.e., use of large muscle groups such as legs, trunk, and arms)
• Fine motor skills development (i.e., use of small muscle groups such as hands and fingers)
• Visual-perceptual skills (i.e., the visual capacity to perceive, process, and respond to objects; to interpret or give meaning to what is seen)
• Visual-motor skills (i.e., coordination of visual perception and body movements such as in hand writing and copying written materials)
• Sensory processing (i.e., appropriate processing of touch, movement, smell, taste, vision, and hearing input)
• Cognitive skills (i.e., reflexive reactions to stimuli, symbolic representations of people, objects, and places through the use of words; understanding space, time; the ability to think; terms of future and past; hypothetical reasoning)
• Social skills (i.e., appropriate manners, personal space, eye contact, active listening, self-expressions, verbal and non-verbal communication, coping skills, time management, self-control; and identifying and maintaining social relationships)
• Psychosocial skills (i.e., ability to interact with others; coping with new or difficult situations; managing behaviors in socially appropriate ways; processing emotions; and establishing friendships and other social relationships)
• Self-care (i.e., grooming, oral hygiene, bathing and showering, toilet hygiene, dressing, feeding and eating, medication routine, and health maintenance)
• General activities of daily living (i.e., independence at home and in the community with everyday functional task/activities)
• Play and leisure skills (i.e., intrinsically-motivating activities for amusement, spontaneous enjoyment, or self-expression)