Weekly Update June 2, 2023

We are pleased to be able to offer all of our children an opportunity for Occupational Therapy integrated into their therapy day at Strive. Leigh Harter Speech Services (LHSS), our current speech partner, has expanded and hired an amazing Occupational Therapist, Paige, who is available to visit both centers.

Why should you look into Occupational Therapy (OT)? A child's life is made up occupations, or everyday activities. These occupations include playing, learning, sleeping, and resting, interacting with friends, getting dressed and other daily activities. OT supports children by incorporating the occupations that are important to you and your child into the intervention process. Many children with Autism benefit from this therapy.

OT services can be integrated right into your child's day at ABA, no need to have evening appointments or drive to another location. Your ABA Therapist will take your child to Paige for his session and will resume ABA when the session is finished.

If you are interested in OT, you can let your BCBA know or contact LHSS directly at www.leighharterspeech.com or call (713)-542-8833.

Paige can provide a screening if you're not sure whether OT is right for your child, and she'll share with you the areas she'd expect to work on.

We might sound like a broken record, but please remember that we do not allow children to wear sandals or crocs. Children must wear closed toe shoes that cover the entire foot and socks daily. This is to protect their feet - we have rolling stools, climbing equipment in our motor rooms and playgrounds, and wood chips outdoors. We will let you know when we have an occasional water play day, and sandals and crocs would be great for the kids to wear outside on those days.

Each Friday in the summer, we plan for an extra fun activity and a dress up day. All the dress up days are designed to be simple ones you can do with things you have at home, please don’t feel obligated to buy anything to make these happen. Staff and children will both participate in dressing up! We'll send home a calendar with all of the dates for the summer, or you can check here for weekly details.

One of our recurring dress up days is School Spirit Day, where we all wear Strive shirts. We will provide Strive shirts for each of the children to wear.

6-9-23

Wheels Day – bring your wheels and helmets! Bring your bike, trike, or scooter and your bike helmet. We'll have all our wheeled toys outside too, so don't worry if you can't bring one.

School Spirit Day – wear your Strive shirt!

6-16-23

Reading Buddies - We do this activity throughout the summer - we'll grab a blanket or a beach towel, a book, and a buddy - and go outside to read.

Pajama Day - wear your PJs. You can send slippers if you like, but be sure we have shoes to play outside.

6-23-23

Sink or Float science experiment - this is a fun outdoor activity to find out which common objects sink and which ones float.

Beach Day - dress like you're headed for the beach - bring your sunglasses, and we'll pretend we're there.

6-30-23

Reading Buddies

Red, white and blue Day - just wear any red, white, and blue you've got.

For 2023, instead of just sharing our background info, we are going to share some of our team's answers to a recent survey. We asked staff what they enjoy most about their jobs overall, what they like to teach the most, and what they would tell other people considering working here. We'll share answers from a new staff member each week!

This week, we'll hear from Tammy, one of our amazing RBTs in Burton.

What is your proudest moment at Strive so far? "Seeing my 1st client graduate and go to school!!!"

What is Tammy's favorite skill to teach? "I love running literacy because I love to read and want to be able to instill a love for reading with all of our kiddos!"

What is your favorite part of your job? "When our kiddos learn a skill and retain it-the look of pure joy on their faces is just priceless-that is my favorite part!!"

One addition to our newsletter this year will be some definitions of terms we use most often in ABA. We know we use a lot of lingo and we want to help families understand it better. All of these terms will also be on our website in a glossary, so you can check them out anytime.

This week's term is Preference Assessment.

A preference assessment is a systematic way of determining what reinforcers are most motivating to an individual at a particular time.

That's a fancy way of saying that a preference assessment is used to find out what your child would most like to do or have at a given time.

We use preference assessments throughout our sessions. Each day, your child's therapist prepares for his arrival by selecting some toys or activities that she thinks he might like. When your child arrives, our fist activity is free play, and we allow the children to explore the toys we've selected, and we get an idea of what he's most interested in. Then we can use that to help motivate your child to work on skills throughout the session. That's a very casual way of completing a preference assessment.

Sometimes, a child appears to lose interest in a toy or activity during the session. When that happens, we may try another casual preference assessment, where we put away several items and get out some new things and see what he's interested in now.

Preference assessments can be much more formal, requiring data sheets and systematic presentation of items to determine a hierarchy of items from most to least preferred. In an everyday session, we don't use this level of formality, but it is often used in research in our field.

Summer is in full swing, and we are experiencing another therapist switch. For some families, your child will be working with someone you may not have worked with before, for some, it will be a return to an old friend. Please keep in mind that switching therapists is important for your children for several reasons:

• It allows generalization of skills, to ensure that your child can respond to any teacher

• It helps to reinforce flexibility and a positive response to changes

• It gives your child a fun and different perspective, with a new person to play with

As parents, the most important thing you can do is say positive things about your child's therapist in front of him - "Look - it's Jill! You're going to have so much fun with her this morning!" or "It sounds like you had a great time with Sue this afternoon!"

We have been adding profiles of our therapists to the newsletters and to our Facebook page, in the hopes that you'll feel like you're getting to know our therapists a little better. You can also pull up those profiles and pictures to show your child who he's going to work with on a given day, or talk about what he did with her earlier that day.

Switching therapists is an important step in preparing your child for school and other settings, and we thank you for your support.

We'll just keep this link right here, for your convenience. For any absences scheduled in advance, please use this form to report the dates. You may take an entire day or half day, depending on your needs.

Therapy Schedule Update Form

Here are some additional dates that the centers will be closed:

Monday, July 3rd and Tuesday, July 4th - Independence Day

Friday, August 25th - Professional Development Day

If your family is planning a longer absence around one of those dates, or at another time, please let us know as soon as you are able!

Email: info@sc-centers.com
Website: www.sc-centers.com
Location: Burton and Brighton, MI
Phone: 810-344-8082