Goals

At Great Kids Place parents and therapists play side by side our great kids. Parents are encouraged to participate in every session. Therapists meet with parents to set functional real life outcomes for goals and work with the family in each session. We also offer parent meetings to review progress, strategies and goals. This approach significantly improves carryover and enhances relationships. See Intensive treatment for more details.

The DIR approach and its Functional Emotional Development Levels is used to guide every interaction.

We all process sensory information in slightly different ways. Some of us enjoy loud music, while others prefer quiet spaces. Some prefer moving all day long and others gravitate towards more sedentary lifestyles. When we think about choices in our careers and lifestyles we can see that we have inherently made choices that align with our need to take in or shut out sensory information in order to feel calm, comfortable and engaged. Some children have a hard time understanding sensory information and how to respond to it. This may be a sign of sensory processing disorder. At Great Kids Place we help children explore sensational experiences and discover preferences in sensory processing. This exploration further supports development of motor, social and learning capacities.

Sensory integration is an integral part of our treatment and is used to facilitate change in challenging areas and support strengths in other areas.

View our FAQ to know if challenges in sensory processing are impacting your child.

With our sensory explorer program at Great Kids we impact your child’s ability to learn and participate in school. Jean Ayres, the founder of Sensory Integration, found connections between sensory challenges and learning challenges. We have since found that by treating underlying sensory challenges we can enhance a child’s ability to learn – improving reading, writing, and general academics.

Many early sensory and motor experiences also support the development of our spatial awareness. This awareness supports our development globally – in relationships, social skills, academics, and self care to name a few. Great Kids Place therapists have worked with developmental optometrists and are extensively trained in visual spatial development. Both structured and play-based activities are infused into treatment to strengthen this important foundational capacity.

View our FAQ to know if challenges in visual spatial development are impacting your child.

A child’s occupations consist of many daily social interactions.   When playing with family and friends, attending school, playing on the playground, eating in restaurants, kids are enjoying being social and expected to be social.

Social interactions start with the body. Think about how many things we “say” with eye gaze, gestures, and body language. When children have challenges with taking in sensory information and performing motor actions, social interactions are always impacted. At Great Kids we facilitate social development in all sessions. With extensive training in the DIR framework we understand social emotional development and how to infuse it into everything we do.

All day, every day we all fluctuate within a range of organization, attention, calm, excitement and various emotions. We have learned ways to regulate our emotional responses, attention and organization based on the expectations of the environment as well as expectations and reactions of others. With extensive training in the DIR framework we understand emotional regulation and co-regulation (changing your arousal state based on other’s responses and inputs) and how to infuse it into everything we do.

Great Kids Place also offers the ZONES of Regulation curriculum to enhance our children’s ability to explore various emotional and attentional states in an appropriate and meaningful way.

The owner of Great Kids Place has co-developed Connect Experience Write®, a unique fun and engaging handwriting program using music and movement to teach pre-writing and writing skills. Kids dance and move to musical tones that simulate writing strokes needed to form letters. As a developmental program, handwriting instruction through CEW® starts with this whole-body movement and progresses to pencil-to-paper work. In CEW®, students then write letters using visual templates while listening to music that simulates the movements needed to form the letters. The visual templates highlight the important landmarks for the letter formation. The music helps determine the type of line to form, for example straight, curved, or diagonal. This combination of visual templates and auditory guides strengthens the visual spatial foundations related to writing.