Another RMT story, I assessed a 5 1/2 year old girl in October, she showed as having several reflexes on, namely ATNR, STNR, TLR, Spinal Galant, Landau, Babkin, and Moro. Functionally she scored just in the low average range on the Beery VMI, average for the Visual Perceptual subtest and very low for the Motor Coordination subtest (likely also due to her very limited attention and rushing through the activity!). It took her about 15 minutes or so to draw a picture of herself (I'm not sure if she was struggling to figure out how to draw it, or because she was so distracted and wanted to use every colour in the pencil crayon box!)...but it was a very primitive drawing. She struggled with writing her letter formations and was only able to write some of her upper case letters with lots of differences in sizes and spacing of letters. Her mother indicated that she is a "busy" child with a limited attention span. Her teacher expressed many concerns about her inability to focus in class and that she was often way off topic. She needed pretty much one to one assistance to get any sort of work done in class. I showed mom how to do 3 passives (from feet, bum rolling and rib cage rocking) and she has been doing these movements with her daughter pretty much daily since late October. She has built up to doing 3 minutes of each movement. Mom reported significant changes in her attention, and the teacher reported that she is very happy with all of this girl's progress! She is able to pay attention to task much better, her handwriting is improving (also she is practicing with a handwriting app as well) and her reading scores have done way up! Mom is a teacher as well so she understands about reading scores and told me that she was scoring in the low range in the Fall! Also, I had done a therapeutic listening trial with this girl over a period of 3 weeks in the Fall and she did really well with that as well. The mom has purchased the headphones and player and we are going to move through a 12 week block or so of the TL program! I think this will help her a lot as well! I showed her the rocking on hands and knees and rolling the head side to side today as well as the cross crawl and infinity 8 drawing along with some other visual activities. I'm planning on using my cold laser as well to help with reflex integration in the near future too!

Heidi McLarty – OT Reg. (Ont. Canada)