While occupational therapy sessions teach and develop a range of skills, it is extremely important that practice is carried out within the home as well. Your Occupational Therapist will always be able to provide you with activities and ideas to incorporate additional practice into the daily routine. This may be through physical activities (playing with spray bottles to develop hand strength), language (specific language to help your child respond appropriately in a particular situation) or strategies that help with providing a supportive environment (visual schedules/ visual timers to assist with routines and transitions).
The Curve of Forgetting shows the amount of information a student can retain after learning new content/skills.
The graph shows that;
- after 20min a child can only recall 60% of what they have learnt
- after 1 hour a child can only recall 50% of what they learnt
- after 1 week a child can only recall 5-10% of what they learnt
- By day 30 we only have 2-3% of the information still in our memory.
However, when a child engages in activities that practice the skills, or utilise the information they have learnt, the amount of retained information increases significantly with each revision.
Research has shown that the practice of strategies at home significantly improves children’s progress towards their goals (Baker, 2012). By practicing skills in the home and community environment a child is likely to build their skills quicker, and retain more of what they have learnt.
OT’s love to work collaboratively with parents, teachers and other caregivers. OTs typically work with a child for 50 min a week which equates to 0.6%. Therefore, it is important that strategies and exercises are carried out throughout the week to ensure the repetition that allows for the greater retention of information.
It can be helpful to think about OTs like physiotherapists, in the sense that we see your child for their session but also provide exercises, strategies, and resources to do at home. If you have a sore back your physio may give you some stretches or exercises to do, if you do them you are likely to get better quicker, whereas if you don’t you are likely to require more sessions and have difficulties for longer.
You don’t need to sit with your child every day and redo the same activities done in their OT session, but by incorporating practice activities and strategies into your daily routine, you will be supporting your child to remember what they have learned and translate this into their daily life.
OTs understand that life is busy and often a little bit chaotic, but OTs are creative people and can come up with lots of ways to incorporate practice into your family’s daily routine. OTs also love to share their ideas with your child’s teacher so that they can continue this practice within the school setting.
Chat to your OT about how you can incorporate practice into your routine, and voice when their suggestions are unlikely to be practical within your household. You can also check out our blog Top 5 ways to build therapy and skill practice into your daily routine.
If you would like more information on how you can provide follow-through from therapy sessions at home, please contact Occupational Therapy Helping Children. Ph (02) 9913 3823 or email hello@occupationaltherapy.com.au.
