Doing therapies at home with your child with autism

Hi, I'm Penny Rogers and I blog over at our crazyadventuresinautismland.com and today we

are talking about doing therapies at home with your special needs child. There are a couple

different types of therapy you can do at home, occupational therapy, speech, physical, sensory

processing disorder therapy, social skills group, and there are a couple different reasons why you

you could do therapy at home you can still be doing therapy in a therapy center and want to

do therapy at home as well it gives your child i have a child with autism so doing therapy at home

allows him to make greater strides with his um with his therapy goals because um he's getting

it not only at therapy but also at home so if you have a therapy center an occupational therapist or

speech therapist that you're working with, you want to simply ask them for an at-home

program with ideas and activities you can do that will help your child reach his therapy

goals faster. You can also do therapy at home because your insurance doesn't cover therapy appointments

or they only cover a certain amount. with Logan they would only cover like $1,500 worth of therapy appointments especially for

occupational therapy so after that we had to pay out of pocket and so it behooved us to make sure

that we were doing therapy at home as well as at the therapy center. A great way to continue therapy

at the center if you would rather do that than at home is to ask them for the cash price. Lots of

therapy centers will give you a substantial discount if you pay cash and they don't have

to file insurance, but you just have to ask them. After a while though, even the cash price was too

much for us, especially if you need therapy three to five times a week, or if you need occupational

speech and physical therapy, if you need multiple therapies, it can add up quickly. So we liked to do

it at home. So for occupational therapy, we worked on motor planning and posterior control

Postural control is as you see in the picture he's laying on his stomach and he is reading a book propped up on his

his elbows and the reason for this is because it helps with the fine motor by

Working on his shoulder strength and his core strength. He was it makes him able to

To do fine motor better. So you want to work on things like that. You can lay under the table and paint

That's a great one for motor planning. Just put art paper underneath your dining room table and let your child lay on his back, sort of like Michelangelo, and paint a picture underneath there. They'll think it's fun. And if you leave it there, then when people come over, they can be like, hey, I have a secret painting. It's loads of fun

So fine motor is just that fine motor. You do that by working with your child on how to pick up Cheerios, if you like, or lacing cards are great for that

Web space development is the area between your thumb and your index finger

They have to have, that has to be strong in order for them to hold their pencil

So you would just Google ideas for how to work on that depending on what your child needs work on

So you have pro-receptive simulation, bilateral coordination, hand arch activities. Heavy work activities are super easy

It's just something, your child carrying something that's heavy or wearing a backpack while doing chores

We just would load up a backpack similar to like if he was going to public school and he had all his books in it

You just put a whole bunch of stuff in a backpack. He would wear it like while he was sweeping or while we were walking, just something like that

So weighted vest work in that area too. Core work, core work, core work. You're not going to have great occupational therapy without a great core. Planks are great for that. Anything you could do to work their core because most, especially children with autism, have hypotonia. Logan has a pretty severe case of it. So we've been working on this for years

um and so they just they're they don't have hypotonia is when they their muscles don't have

a whole lot of control so no matter what you do um they sort of look like a giant marshmallow

and so it you really really really really really have to work on the core work in order to make

all of these other things go into place there has to be a good core so if you don't work on anything

um work on core work and the pool is great for that if you happen to have a pool there's great

pool activities that you can do that that will work decor while the child thinks they're having fun

and of course hand-eye coordination this is easily done it's probably the easiest out of all of the

occupational therapy items because that you can do that playing video games you can do that playing

tennis you can throw a ball back and forth the point is is that you can work on occupational

therapy at home but it doesn't have to be fancy you don't need a scooter board i mean if you have

one great you can it's perfect for using on your carport or your driveway but you

can use things like tennis balls to throw back and forth tennis balls are

great for the hand arch activities because you just squeeze it and it helps

build up your your hand strengths fine motor can be as simple as opening and

closing close pins so that there it works their finger strength so the point

is is that occupational therapy is easily done at home you just have to

think out of the box. Speech therapy is another one of those that you can work

on at home without a whole lot of equipment. So everyday language therapy

is simply where your child comes up and speaks with you and you correct them as

they speak. So if Logan were to come up and he would be having difficulty

is saying a certain sound for Logan this is the TH sound together he always says it as an F instead

of the so when he is speaking with us I I will often correct his a thaw which he says to

the so that he it reminds him that he is saying it wrong and that he needs to work on that now I

would not do this every single time your child spoke because then your child's going to quit

speaking to you. Let's be honest. Nobody wants to talk to someone who makes them feel bad. So

once or twice during the conversation when Logan says the TH sound incorrectly, I will correct the

word, but that's probably for 50 times he says the TH sound incorrectly during the conversation when

I don't correct it. So don't correct every single thing your child's doing wrong in everyday language

therapy because you want the child to still make progress. Utilize your child's passions in this

a great time to work on speech therapy is when you're talking about for us dinosaurs whatever

your child likes it could be dinosaurs it could be trains it could be it could be you know I don't

know reptiles I'm trying to think of all the things Logan's into it could be baby dolls whatever

your child likes use that to your advantage and your and have your child talk to it or talk about

it baby dolls are a great thing for that because your child can have a conversation back and forth

with her with her baby so that way you can work on some things that she needs to work on as well

memorization and recitation are perfect for speech therapy and lots of people overlook this

teaching your child especially your special needs child to memorize something i know here in autism

it's easy to get him to memorize it because he just that's the way his brain is wired logan can

he can memorize anything. He also has a near photographic memory, so once he reads it one or two times

he has it in his brain. It's great for motor planning. It helps make those neural pathways when they memorize

so absolutely have them memorize The best part for speech therapy is when they memorize it and they recite it back to you They learn those sounds and combinations that they may not be able to learn just by you teaching them

So it's sort of like teaching your kids grammar by having them read good literature

If your child's reading good books, they're going to learn grammar without you even trying

This is the exact same thing for speech therapy. If you have your child memorize something, something easy

I mean, we're not asking a four-year-old to memorize the preamble to the Constitution

That would be crazy. But a fun little poem or something, some Shakespeare, something like that, and recite it back will be great for working on speech therapy

Narration is another one. where you read a story and the child tells you back in their own words what

what they heard or what they comprehended from the story. This works

great for speech therapy because it can tell you if there are any auditory processing delays and if there are, if your child's hearing something

completely different than what you're reading then you need to work on that

before you work on speech because you can't have good speech if the child's

not hearing what you're saying correctly. So this narration is a great way to work on auditory processing delays, which go hand

in hand with speech therapy. You want to do a multi-sensory approach to this

Just like anything else with special needs, your child most likely thinks in pictures

or most likely will get the best educational benefit from using all of their senses

So for speech, you might want to work on sensory boxes as you do speech sounds

or you might want to make, if you're working on the F sound, you might want to make frogs

that jump so that your child has a way to connect the speech sound with something they've done

So again, you're just making the connection needed in their brain to make sure that that speech sound comes out correctly

Physical therapy is often one of those overlooked therapy options to do at home. Physical therapy

helps all of the other therapies sort of fall into place. So it's important to do physical

therapy with your special needs child, even if you don't do it at some sort of center

As you can see, my number one thing on the slide is core work. Having a strong core will help your

child to do many other things. So I can't emphasize core work enough. Again, planks, playing in the pool

anything that helps the core work. The slide shows Logan on a horse. We did hippotherapy for a long

time, and that is a great way. That's a fantastic way to work on core work. So if you can find

an equestrian center in your area that does some sort of special needs

activities so that your child can ride horses. That's great. It doesn't have to be a certified

hippotherapy program, but I would recommend that you check out the program to be sure

that they know how to work with special needs kids. For a long time, Logan just rode the horse

around and then we moved on to the actual hippotherapy center and the hippotherapy skills

but it helped him just to ride the horse. So if that's all you can do, then something's better than nothing and do it

But make sure that the people that are working with your child are verified

and that they are patient because your child may be afraid of the horse

Logan did not get on the horse the first eight times we went out to the hippotherapy center

So you have to remember that our special needs kids also have other comorbid conditions like anxiety and things like that, OCD

So I know, well, in autism, they often have comorbid conditions like that

So you have to take that into account as well. Stamina work is a great one because your child's not going to be able to do anything if they can't keep up with you

So working on staying with you. Walking is great for this, if your child can do that

We walked a little further every time. Sitting upright at the table with me for short bursts and then gradually increasing it, we worked on that

He walked on the treadmill as well. Yoga is great, again, for the core work, but also for stretching the muscles

You want to make sure that they're getting the right stretches that go along with the other so that their body parts will work for the other therapies

Yoga is perfect for stretching and helping out all of your occupational therapy work

So certainly if you can find a kid's yoga class or something like that, that's fun too

For boys, it's a little different because boys don't like to take yoga

Logan was good with it until he got a little bit older and then when he's the only boy in there he was like yeah no mom so

So remember that if you have boys that some of these things like boys may or may not want to take yoga

You may have to sell it a little different than you do than you do with a girl

Massage is also great taking your child for massage It helps work out those knots in there in their body which helps their muscles to stretch and to do what you need them to do

most kids even older kids will go for a massage that's one of Logan's favorite

memories is when we used to go to for massages on on a regular basis so it

helps to relax them and it also helps their body to to make the connections so

it's twofold their local specific stretching is when you know that your

child has a problem with the specific muscle and you just work that muscle so

Logan had tight Achilles and so he couldn't walk for long periods of time because then his ankles

and his feet would hurt so we worked specifically on stretching just that muscle so that was in

addition to the core work stamina work all that other work where it stretches all of them kind of

works all of the muscles but if there's something specific that your child needs work on then that

would be the local specific stretching you can find lots of ideas on Google you just Google

active kids and it will most of these things will come up and you can just adapt them to your child's

limitations so if it came up to do jumping jacks and then burpees we would just do the jumping

jack part because Logan would never be able to do a burpee heck I'm an adult and I can't do a burpee

but Logan would not have the coordination needed to do that, so we would have to start much smaller

and work on the jumping jacks and then move on to the burpee if we were going to do that

Sensory processing therapy is a little different than all the other therapies. I stuck this in here

because it's important that you take into account your child's sensory needs or issues because you

have to address those first and foremost before you can any of the other things will work. If

their sensory system is out of out of whack and just going crazy, nothing you do is going to work

So it's important to have a sensory diet in place and that could include sensory bags

bins or bottles. As you see in the picture, we make Olaf sensory bags and they have fun moving

Olaf's eyes and nose and all that all around and that that activity is actually on my blog if you're

interested. There's brushing and joint compressions. Brushing is where you take the you take a dry

brush and you sort of brush their arms and legs and then you do joint compressions after and it

resets the nervous system to help them to calm down and to be able to sit for long not long

periods but longer periods than they normally sit and that's on my blog as

well. Listening therapy is a great one. It's where they they listen to on their

headphones and they try to follow the sound That is great for auditory processing delays because it helps make those neural pathways that I been talking about for a while in their brain so that they can then make the connections and hear

what you're saying better so that then their speech their speech will come along. Erlen lenses

are good using different color or you could use different colored paper if you can't afford the

Erlen lenses that helps kids who have some sort of it's an auditory processing issue but it's

because the child can't see what's on the paper so the using different colored paper helps their

brain to focus on the words that are on the paper rather than on the fact that there's a giant piece

of paper and trying to differentiate between the words in the paper so a lot of times if people

found that if you just copy their schoolwork onto different colored paper, they can do it

It works great for people with dyslexia. Lots of people use that little trick in the dyslexia groups

Sensory breaks are what we call brain breaks here in autism land. It's after you work for 10 or 15 minutes

you get up, you run around, you do some jumping jacks, you just get up and move

their attention span, especially for when they're super young, like this sweet girl is

is going to be five to 10 minutes tops. The sooner you realize that and make it work for your child

the better it's going to be for everybody. So just do five to 10 minutes. Take a five minute

break where you get a drink of water. Sometimes getting some ice water will help reset the nervous

system where you just walk around you play some silly game and then you come

back to your homeschool work so that way your child has that break their body

has reset and they're ready to to move on learning where their body is in space

is another thing that is hard for kids with with autism or with special needs

because it's hard for them to know how to move their body and where their body

relates to when they're when they're walking around so they may flail they

They may move around in ways that look odd to other people because they don't have a

good concept of where their body is in space. So you may need to work on that

Chewlery is always a good idea, especially if you have a chewer

And a chewer is someone who is going to chew on their pencil, on their pen, on their shirt

They have to have something in their mouth. And if you don't have chewlery, ice works good for this

Giving them some sort of gum is good. They can chew gum while they work

A lot of times that will reset the nervous system. They can, you know, suck on, if they're older and they're not going to choke to death on it

because no one wants to do the Heimlich maneuver during homeschool lessons, they can, you know, small candies like peppermints and things like that

that sort of wake up their nervous system and help them to focus

So all of those things are great. There's also, your child doesn't have to sit at the table in order to do their lessons

So they could sit on an exercise ball and sort of bounce up and down

You can put rubber bands across the bottom of the chair so that their feet can move back and forth as they work

So things like that, just acknowledging that they have some sensory processing issues

and that you need to make accommodations for that in your home school

will help your homeschool go so much better. Social skills therapy is another one that you can

it's sort of easy to add it into your homeschool for free

And I do a whole session in this particular homeschool track on that. So you want to catch that one, but it's, it's super easy to do

You would utilize different areas for different skills. So if you're working on waiting in line, you would go to the post office

If you're working on waiting your turn, you could go to the park

So you can use the library, the store, different areas to work on different skills

It's important to know your child's developmental age. You can't expect something out of your 10-year-old child that he is not able to do because developmentally he's five years old

So if your 10-year-old is at a five-year-old level, you would expect whatever a five-year-old would do, even though your child is chronologically 10

So Logan is chronologically almost 21, but he's really developmentally still in the 13 to 15 year old range

So I would expect attitude like a 13 to 15 year old or behaviors that are typical for a 13 to 15 year old boy, not that are typical for an almost 21 year old man

So it's important that you know their developmental age. Socialization, of course, isn't about same age peers

Your goal for your child is to get them within a couple years or so of their actual chronological age as an adult

Because as an adult, we don't socialize just with our same age peers

I don't go out and just hang out with other 45-year-old women or people

I have friends who are in their 30s, who are in their 20s, who are in their 60s, who are in their 50s

You get a wide area, range of friends there in ages. So socialization doesn't have to be just with 10-year-olds

If you have a 10-year-old, you want to expose your child to social situations with different ages and different genders

just so that they have experience dealing with different kinds of people

Always, always, always safety first when you're working on social skills. Lots of kids with special needs don't have the concept of danger

So they often tell too much information to people that don't need to know it, like where

they live, who's home. They will go off with people they don't know because they don't realize that those people

could hurt them. They may be attracted to water or they may not realize that they have to look both ways

before crossing the street. All of these are skills that you have to work on

So make sure that there are always eyes on your child, even when you're working on social

skills so that you keep them safe. If they are an eloper or a wanderer, you want to get some sort of GPS system like AngelSense

on them so that you can find them quickly, should they disappear in the blink of an eye

which they tend to do. There are lots of great places to find therapy items that are cheap

Amazon's a great one. Amazon has everything, so I buy everything off Amazon

Local sporting goods stores are going to have great things like exercise balls

therabands, things like that. The Target dollar bin and Dollar Tree are where you're going to find the great things

to work on. Fine motor, like the lacing cards or auditory processing, you can find the search and find

books in there. Super cheap, you know, like a dollar, so you're not, you don't feel terrible for buying it

even though you have 50 of them at home. TheraPro, Children's Therapy Store, and Lakeshore Learning are all online retailers that have

great therapy items that you can use for your child. So those are just some of the places I look when I'm looking for therapy items for Logan

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so now that I've told you all the fun ways you can do therapy at home which is perfect if you're

trying to afford autism or special needs let's talk about ways to fund therapy at home because

therapy whether you do it at home or in a center it can be expensive so you need to sort of think

out of the box here if you need big items like a trampoline or if you're looking for someone to

fund the hippotherapy things like that so a lot of states like Florida and Arizona have state

homeschooling scholarships Florida has the Gardner scholarship and Arizona has what we call the ESA

scholarship that you can buy therapy items you get a certain amount of money for your child for the

year and then you can buy therapy items like exercise balls and things like that that you need

to help your child to learn. So look into your state homeschooling scholarship. It's always good

to look there. The Kiwanis Club, Easter Seals, and Shriners will often have, I sort of forgot how

to talk there, but they will often have ways, grants that you can use to buy the bigger items

or to help buy the bigger items. Like if your child needs a three-wheel bike because he can't

he can't ride a bike or if he needs a certain kind of wheelchair because it

would be better for his therapy or if you need a trampoline so that your child

can run outside and take a brain break those three organizations will often

give out grants that will help either they'll either purchase it for you or

they'll give you a substantial amount of money toward it so don't overlook those

those three organizations or organizations like that. There are always national organizations for

your child's diagnosis. We have autism here in autism land so I would look at the National Autism

Society. The National Autism Association will often give out grants for iPads for nonverbal

children so just look into some of those big national organizations and see what they do

do to help out families. Of course a bake sale and a yard sale is always a good idea. The best yard sale

we ever had was when we just told people to set the price. You just set all the items out there

and they just come up and they pay what they can. Lots of people, especially if you have big signs

and you have a donation jar, things like that there, will give more than the item's worth because

they know that you're using it to fund therapy. So if you need a big ticket item, don't overlook

especially at the holidays to bake sales but during the year the yard sales and

things like that they can be a lot of work to pull off but they can also be

pretty pretty beneficial a GoFundMe page or an ongoing you caring page where

people can check in or if you happen to have you want to blog it so that people

can sort of follow along on your adventure are are great ways to do it as

well don't be afraid to just flat out say on social media if your child needs

an item that's out of your range. Hey, my kid needs a trampoline. Here's how it helps. Here's

what we're hoping to do with it. Here's how much it costs. And lots of people, especially friends

and family, will normally step up and say, hey, I could give you five or ten dollars for that

And then it helps you to save up that much faster. I would not do that like, you know, every day or

every month but sometimes when Logan needs a big ticket item or his sister

needed $900 hard contact lenses and so I just I couldn't afford a $900 copay

with all the other therapies we were doing and so I went on to Facebook and

set up a GoFundMe and it was funded in no time because friends and family want

to help they just don't know how to help so if you're honest with them on why you

you need it and you're not asking you know for a trip to Disney World or

something like that most people will be will be happy to help you so don't

overlook just just flat-out asking and setting up a GoFundMe or a YouCaring

page the difference between GoFundMe and YouCaring is that YouCaring normally has the medical issues and things like that on it and they don't

charge for it where GoFundMe either you're gonna pay a fee for it or I

I think they've changed it recently so that when people give a donation they have to pay a certain fee to go toward

Funding GoFundMe because I mean they are business So that's the difference GoFundMe has a fee and you Karen does not

Lots of people don't know how to they know about GoFundMe and they know how to use it. So that's why

It's more recognizable So, there you have it. That's how we do therapy at home here in Autism Land for our child with autism and his sister

as she needs it. So we have all of these ideas and how we do it online on my blog, Facebook, Twitter

You'll see day-to-day pictures on Instagram and I also have a group, Life in Autism Land

that you can join. But if you have any questions or if you need any assistance, if you have a specific problem that you need help with, feel free to email me at penny at our crazy adventures in autism land dot com

And I would be happy to discuss it with you and give you anything, any advice that I think that might be beneficial for you

Thanks for joining me. Have a great day