Because we do most of our work in a clinic setting we often have to get creative on how to support a family with working on tasks that will carry over to home. There are so many tasks out there that I will take a minute and talk about one task that we modified in the clinic. Feel free to let us know if you need ideas for how to modify other tasks, and we will share more as they come up for us.
This task is getting in and out of the bathtub. The child we work with has a lot of difficulty with initiating movement and eccentric control and this is a challenging task for her and her parents to make sure she is doing it safely. If you watch the video you can see how we adapted our clinic to support the task. The goal is for it to carryover to her home environment.
Her parents had let us know the height of her bathtub at home so we set a dowel at approximately that height. They are lucky enough to have something for her to hold onto when she steps in and out of the tub so we were able to let her hold on. Then the challenge was getting into sitting. Her preferred method when asked to do it on her own is to sink into a low squat and ‘plop’ into sitting. This didn’t seem safe so we worked on using half kneel to get down. With lots of visual cues and tactile cues to start she was able to get this down by the end of the session.
Even though she had it at the end of the session, we still want to see how carryover goes at home and where they are still seeing challenges so we can make modifications. We also want to see if she can carry it over between sessions in the clinic and will continue to check the skill, while decreasing the cueing that we need to provide so that she becomes more independent with the activity.
What are tasks you have modified from home to clinic?