Mission Statement

Our mission is to assist infants, toddlers, adolescents, and teenagers in reaching their full potential so that they can be successful, confident and independent during self-care, play/recreation activities, and learning/ work times at home and in the community.

Therapy and Treatment Goals

The Occupational Therapists at Abilities First LLC will create an individualized treatment plan to help your child progress and succeed.

Some of the issues that will be addressed are:

• Feeding: oral motor skills, self-feeding, helping the ‘picky’ eater
• Managing meltdowns/ improving self-regulation
• Manipulating tools: scissors, fork/spoon, pencils/crayons
• Motor planning: helping the ‘clumsy’ child who falls a lot, bumps into things, and is awkward in movement
• Prewriting: drawing shapes, draw a person
• Self-care/dressing/grooming (including zipping, buttons, and shoe tying)
• Sensory registration: helping the child who is hypersensitive (over registers) or hyposensitive (under registers) to sight, smell, sound, taste, movement, touch, or pressure.
• Visual motor: eye hand coordination, imitation of movement, building/construction, writing
• Visual perceptual: puzzles, matching skills, foundational skills for reading/math/spelling
• Writing skills: printing, cursive, keyboarding

Specialized Services

With the staff at Abilities First LLC trained and experienced in Occupational Therapy evaluation and treatment, we provide specialized services to infants, toddlers, adolescents and teenagers. We have additional training and certification to perform the following:

• Astronaut Training
• Brain Gym
• Self-Care Training
• Sensory Integrative Treatment
• Therapeutic Listening

Other Services and Programs

• Bal-A-VisX: A series of rhythmic balance, auditory, and vision exercises for brain and body integration.
• Fine Motor/Handwriting: Writing requires adequate hand strength, coordination, and appropriate registration of proprioceptive and tactile input to hold and manipulate the pencil and grade how much pressure you need to mark the paper. Good visual perceptual and visual motor skills are needed to copy the information correctly and place it on the identified part of the paper.
• Infant Massage: Uses gentle, deep pressure strokes to help the child with overall regulation of body systems.
• Kinesio Taping: This rehabilitative treatment technique makes use of strategic taping using Kinesio Tape, which is made of cotton but has elastic properties.
• Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention (REI): An auditory program that uses musical rhythm to stimulate and repattern neurological function.
• Therapeutic Yoga: Fun age-appropriate yoga exercises to help children and adolescents improve their coordination, communication, and gross/fine motor skills. Improvements have been noted in core strength, balance, range of motion/flexibility, motor planning, body awareness, breath support, and calming.
• Feeding: Our Occupational Therapists evaluate feeding difficulties by looking at the whole person.

Summer Camps:

• Fine Motor Fun Camp – This camp is for children ages 4 to 6 who will not enter Kindergarten in the Fall.
• Write Into Kindergarten – This camp is for children ages 5 to 7 who will enter Kindergarten in the Fall.
• Write 4 U – This camp is offered to children who will enter grades 1st – 3rd in the Fall who have already had initial instruction in upper- and lower-case letters but need further work on core/hand strength, grasp, sizing, and spacing of letters, words, and sentence writing.