What does OT mean to you?

Telethon Speech & Hearing’s Occupational Therapy team celebrated OT Week with a series of activities for TSH staff aimed at providing a better understanding of the services the OT team offers students at the school.

#OTWeek2022 #WhatOTMeansToMe

The theme for this year’s OT Week was “What OT means to me” and staff were encouraged to capture personal experiences of OT on a poster.

The first activity staff engaged in was called Jelly stereognosis and required participants to identify common household items hidden under a cloth, embedded in soft jelly.

“People who have difficulty with stereognosis may find it hard to hold items in their hands and engage in occupations such as self-care tasks, handwriting, cutting and baking,” explained TSH’s Chloe Moore.

“They may also have difficulty searching through a school bag to find an item, for example. People with touch difficulties may also respond to different textures in ways that we may not expect them to, such as disliking their hands getting wet or dirty, or the feeling of clothing on their skin i.e. tags, seams.; disliking or having strong food preferences when eating at mealtimes; or they may be aversive or avoid some touch experiences such as painting, cooking and washing.”

Some staff showed heightened stress at not knowing what they were going to touch, while others enjoyed the tactile sensory activity.

“Children with tactile defensiveness experience these strong and unpleasant physiological responses to all sorts of everyday textures that they are exposed to throughout their day which can impact their participation and engagement,” Moore elaborated.

From here, the participants moved onto blindfold threading. This activity involved blindfolding staff to see if they could use two hands to manipulate and thread beads onto string.

“This activity involves using the touch and proprioceptive sensory systems as well as problem solving and planning and adjusting motor movements to be successful with the task.”

Participants were timed, with the incentive to complete the task in the shortest period of time being a bottle of wine for the winner.

The final activity challenged participants to shoots over stacked cups using a spray water bottle.

“This activity looked at hand strength, eye-hand coordination, and visual tracking skills,” said Moore. “Staff were encouraged to stack paper cups into a pyramid using the correct force and then use the spray bottles to trigger and aim water to knock each cup down in a systematic top-down approach.”

For more information about TSH’s Occupational Therapy Clinic, click here.

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Telethon Speech & Hearing acknowledges and thanks all individuals and organisations for their support of our centre, including: Channel 7 Telethon Trust, Channel 7 and The West Australian