Master 5 had his weekly therapy session this morning and I was thrilled to share our breakthrough from yesterday with his OT.
To start the session she had Master 5 do some core muscle development. Due to his sever lack of muscle tone the simplest things are very difficult for our little man. He cannot sit on the floor for more than a minute without having to lay down, he can’t sit in a chair at school or at home without having to rest his head and top half of his body on the desk. So we have to start building up his core strength.
She had him climb into a therapy nest. It is basically a big square frame that has special elastic material, almost like a trampoline but the material has so much give you sink into it. He than had to stand and support himself with out hanging onto the side.
The amount of give in the nest means that he is using all his core muscles to keep himself upright. After a few minutes she added the extra challenge of having to catch a ball. This puts him of balance and as such has to use that much more effort to stay up. He fell every time so she set him the challenge of seeing how long he could stay standing once he had caught the ball. His record for today was 25 seconds.
Even though he fell, just having to pull himself back up and into the standing position is all fantastic exercise for his core muscles. After standing and catching she than had him lay in the nest and through the ball up in the air and catch it again himself. This is great for strengthening his arm muscles.
After all that standing effort he was a little bit exhausted so she moved him onto a fine motor skill activity. She straight away changed the way we were teaching him his letters and started to say the sound instead and would you believe it he managed to spell his first word!!! Robot. He sounded it out and picked the correct letters for each sound. I was so excited!
He practiced writing it several times following the guide dots that his OT positioned on his paper for him, but only the starting dots, he wasn’t actually tracing so this is another huge leap forward for Master 5. He was very very pleased with himself and so were we!
After learning how to write the word, he then had to draw a picture of his robot. He was copying a toy she had on the desk that he was very keen on playing with so we used that as motivation to finish his writing session as by this stage he was getting very very tired.
After his writing and picture were done he hadn’t another core muscle strengthening session. This time on the crash mats. First he had to roll down the mat keeping his hands above his head and his legs out straight. Not an easy task for someone with no muscle strength but he loves to roll around and really enjoyed it.
The next activity was to crawl up the crash mars with a weighted toy on his back, he had to make it to the top of the mat and place the toy in the bucket without it falling off. Again not so easy but he managed a few times and again he found this a lot of fun.
Last up for the day was balancing the weighted toy bag on his head. Funnily enough he found this even harder than carrying it on his back. He only managed to get 2 bags in the box at the top of the mat befor he was absolutely exhausted and we called it a day. Even though their was still a little time left he had had enough and still had a full day at school waiting for him.
Overall today’s session was amazing. I learnt some new activities for him to do at home. We discovered a new pen grip tool that he seems to use far more easily than the one we were already using so we are going to swap them over and he spelt his first word, that alone is just amazing and I couldn’t be more proud of the effort he made today.
Thanks for reading and sharing in our journey!
