This year, we have formed a partnership with Georgia State not only to receive free speech
and language therapy, but also to receive occupational therapy from graduate level
clinicians!
What is Occupational Therapy?
Occupational therapists (OTs) focus on helping people do their everyday activities. For
children, OTs help specifically with fine motor, visual-perceptual, and cognitive skills in
addition to working on sensory-processing issues. All of these skills are vital to a child’s
experiences in school, in play, and at home.
Why do children facing homelessness need OT?
For students at Atlanta Children’s Shelter, trauma negatively impacts their ability to
reach developmental milestones. Trauma affects all the skills listed above, but especially
cognitive skills and sensory-processing skills. Often, children with trauma process
their social environment with hypervigilance or with disassociation. For children
with severe trauma, they often waver between the two extremes.
In working on these sensory-processing skills and working on cognitive skills that interpret
them, occupational therapists can help our students manage their physiological
and emotional responses to everyday activities.
We could not be more excited about this partnership and all
the ways it will improve the lives of our students!
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