Speech and Language Therapy

Our speech/Language Pathologists help children with articulation, oral motor skills, feeding issues, language comprehension, expressive communication, and phonemic awareness. Our therapists also work closely with the child to improve their attention span, critical thinking, social and play skills.

Physical Therapy

Our physical therapists help facilitate a child’s age-appropriate gross motor skills. Therapy focuses on improving muscle flexibility, muscle strength, balance and coordination, endurance, motor planning, motor control and body awareness. Treatment regimes include: stretching, strengthening, gait training, balance and coordination training, sensory integration, and object manipulation skills. Techniques include: manual techniques, therapeutic handling, Neurodevelopmental treatment (NDT) techniques, sensory input, as well as age-appropriate toys and games, obstacle courses and gross motor skills to enhance a child’s functioning. Physical therapist and Watch Me Grow Creator/Director Shirael Pollack, MSPT, has extensive experience working with children and young adults with a variety of conditions.

Occupational Therapy

Our occupational therapists help facilitate a child’s age-appropriate fine motor skills. Therapy focuses on improving hand writing, visual motor skills, upper body strength, attention span, organization skills, coordination and body/spatial awareness. Our OT’s also focus on encouraging age appropriate play skills, activities of daily living, and sensory integration.

Sensory Integration Program

Sensory integration, is the ability to take in information through senses (touch, movement, smell, taste, vision, and hearing), to put it together with prior information, memories, and knowledge stored in the brain, and to make a meaningful response. Sensory integrative dysfunction is a disorder in which sensory input is not integrated or organized appropriately in the brain and may produce varying degrees of problems in development, information processing, and behavior. Watch Me Grow offers an innovative approach to sensory integration and strives to maintain a team-based model where the child’s needs always come first!

What Is Sensory Integration?

The three basic senses involved are: tactile, vestibular, and proprioceptive

Tactile System: information such as light touch, pain, temperature, and pressure. A dysfunction in this system may present itself in the following ways:

• When being touched, a child will withdraw
• Refusing to eat certain foods or wear certain clothes
• Refusing to having his/her face or hair washed
• Avoiding use of his/her whole hand when manipulating objects
• Avoiding getting his/her hands dirty (i.e., glue, sand, dirt, paint)
• Hyper-sensitive - The child perceives light touch as painful
• Hyposensitive - The child does not perceive deep pressure

Vestibular System: information on the position of your head (tilted, upright or downward-even with your eyes closed). A dysfunction within this system may manifest itself in two different ways:

• Hypersensitive to vestibular stimulation - a child is afraid of swings, inclines, slides and climbing up ladders and/or stairs. This may result in the apprehension of walking or climbing on uneven surfaces. This child is often the “clumsy” child.

• Hyporeactive/Hyposensitive - This child will seek out constant movement, for example, excessive body spinning, jumping, running and crashing.

Proprioceptive System: This refers to components of muscles, joints, and tendons that provide a person with a subconscious awareness of body position. This allows a child to sit still on a chair or on the floor without constant movement. It also allows for fine motor manipulation of objects such as: holding utensils, writing with a pencil, drinking from a cup, and buttoning a shirt. A dysfunction in this system may present in the following ways:

• Falling on the floor
• Poor posture
• Minimal or no crawling
• Difficulty holding small objects
• Messy eater
• Poor awareness of where the child’s body is in space
• Poor motor planning skills

Please contact us if you feel your child may present with a sensory dysfunction.