Helping your children reach their full potential
Our Pediatric OT Services
Our Services May Be Provided:
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Assessment
Our practice offers a comprehensive occupational therapy assessment for children, using a variety of standardized and functional assessments and parent questionnaires. The assessment begins with parent’s concerns and goals for their child, and ends with refinement of those goals to be developmental, measurable and achievable with an individualized treatment plan. Our comprehensive assessment includes a full medical report to share with the family’s team. Focused assessments are available to those with past assessments by other providers. Both medical and IEP-related assessments are available.
Treatment
Our Children’s Therapy offers comprehensive pediatric occupational therapy for a wide variety of developmental challenges. Our treatments are fun, challenging, collaborative, child-centered and family-directed. The treatment plan is designed individually with parents and the team for your child according to their strengths and family functional priorities.
Treatment for Self-regulation
Our Children’s Therapy draws from the Alert program and the Winner-Garcia social skills series, as well as anti-bullying programs and the UCLA Friendmaker curriculum. The incredible five point scale, the Zones of Regulation scale and other similar scales are utilized in teaching self-awareness and self-calming.
Treatment of fine motor weakness
We use a variety of toys and games to improve finger, hand and wrist strength and coordination in our therapy sessions, and make suggestions for home or school strategies to incorporate strengthening challenges into daily routines.
Treatment of gross motor & vestibular sensory
Our therapies utilize vestibular therapy with a variety of therapy swings, scooterboards and balance equipment. We teach Bal-a-vis-x routines with beanbags and balls to improve bilateral coordination and eye-hand coordination. We use many motor activiites to increase core strength, including yoga.
Treatment of feeding challenges
Depending on the child’s age, we support transitions from bottle to solids, help with learning to chew, promote techniques to decrease overstuffing of food, and teach skilled use of utensils. The SOS approach to feeding is utilized to expand children’s food choices and to prevent food jags (insisting on same food everyday, then burning out on it after a month and refusing the food).
Treatment of Handwriting Skills
There can be many reasons children struggle with handwriting, including visual tracking, attention, visual perception, hand strength and coordination, and postural stability. Our assessments tease out these variables, and we have therapies to address all of them. We provide compensatory strategies and tools to improve handwriting output until treatment addresses the underlying sensory and motor disabilities and improves fine motor strength and coordination, laterality and perceptual skills. We use Handwriting Without Tears, Benbow Loops & Groups, and the BC Printing Like A Pro program.
Treatment of anxiety
Anxiety work with older children includes cognitive behavioral approaches, sometimes drawing from Tony Atwood’s workbooks. With younger children, we draw from a variety of stories and children learn to label and make connections between their body signals, their thoughts and their emotions, using the interoception curriculum and many other resources and activities.
Treatment for Autism
Our Children’s Therapy offers a variety of services for children with autism including treatment of feeding, balance, coordination, strength, handwriting, social skills, sensory processing, sensory sensitivity, and self-regulation of behaviour.
What our clients say
Testimonials
Meet Our Therapist
Pamela Hood Szivek, OT
Occupational Therapist Registered and Licensed
Miss Pam, as her young clients call her, has more than 25 years experience as a pediatric occupational therapist in a variety of settings including early intervention, schools, homes, clinics and private practice. She has participated in research studies and written and received grants to start innovative programs. In 2010 she opened a practice in Corvallis, Oregon, in 2013 she expanded to offer telehealth services throughout Oregon, and in 2017 she opened the Canadian Children’s Therapy office in Victoria, BC.
OT For Schools
If you are interested in bringing live online OT to your local school district, check out our OT programs for schools and pass the information on to your district’s special educators.