I passed Zoolander’s Sensory Eval on to her school and to our private Occupational Therapist. Zoolander began seeing our OT once a week and our OT began working directly with the school district’s OT to implement some of the suggestions from the report.

Zoolander loves her time with our OT.  They usually start the session with some kind of swinging activity, followed by work on cursive handwriting.  Our OT noticed that Zoolander had a difficult time, even with cursive, because her letter formation is far from automatic. Sometimes cursive is supposed to be better for visual-spatial kids because it’s more fluid and artistic.  

The beauty of visiting this OT is that she’s wonderful and really gets my twice exceptional kids, plus she’s close to our house, but… insurance won’t pay for her services.  Insurance insists that we can drive 20 miles to the nearest OT who specializes in grannies with arthritis and who have no training in working with kids who have difficulty with Sensory Processing.  So, there you go.

Luckily, our OT understands the expense and gives us lots of ideas to try at home, plus she tapers off her sessions once she feels the child is improving.  The books, The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder and The Out-of-Sync Child Has Fun have lots of great info and activities.

It’s also very helpful that our OT works quite often with the school district’s OT.  That takes me out of the middle of things.  They talk. The school’s OT observes and then makes adjustments and provides any sensory tools that they might need in the classroom.

Zoolander now has a special balancing chair, which she says helps her concentrate because she can move around more. She is also allowed to use a laptop for written work, which she says makes writing much easier.

I know the team at school takes care with Zoolander’s placement in the classroom, making sure distractions are minimized.  They are also conscious of the fact that if Zoolander is fidgety, she may need a Sensory Break, which could just be running an errand to the office or erasing the white board.

Zoolander has shown improvement since these sensory accommodations were made, but I still felt that there was something else that was getting in the way of her learning.  So, I put her on the waiting list for a Learning Evaluation.