Where Albert Goes For His Therapy

Today was therapy day for Albert again.

He goes to HELP Therapy Center in Makati. An hour once a week for his speech therapy with teacher Joey, and an hour twice a week for occupational therapy with teacher Amy. I had a hard time finding before slot for speech therapy and have asked many therapy centers from Alabang to Manila already before. It was when I inquired for availability of a kinder slot in a preschool  in Makati, Kids in A Day School, that HELP was referred to me.

He almost slept through the entire afternoon and would  have been absent from his OT and S.T. sessions today had I not persisted in waking him up around 2pm--just one hour from the start of his OT. Then it rained so hard that we were almost soaking wet as we hailed out a cab. From where we now live, cabs without passengers are often hard to come by so we must be out in the street at least 30 minutes to 3pm so as not to be late for the therapy.

inside HELP's waiting area

The therapy center is a simple bungalow house, with rooms each for evaluation, S.T., O.T. There's also a waiting area with seats and magazines for moms and yayas waiting for their charge to finish. Inside the O.T. room, the floor is rubber padded, with toys, small tables, pillows, and addie slide. There was 4 therapist with 4 kids doing therapy at one time (one hour), and yes its a bit crowded since the room was small, but it was comfortable enough and airconditioned. Sessions would commence with both the therapist and the patient/student sitting on the padded floor. It reminds me of play areas you find inside malls.

For the speech therapy rooms, there are I think 3-4 cubicles for each therapist. The cubicle Albert uses has a an elongated table facing a blank wall. This is good since it lessens distractions. The room is airconditioned too. I was only able to sit in during his evaluation, which consisted of teacher Joey showing pictures of action words, common household items and etc., having Albert point the answers, making him say out loud the answers (which was in vain since this has been my son's problem, he just would not answer verbally), and making him follow simple directions like "put this cup here inside the box" (which my son had some difficulty following unless you show how it is done  first). The result of the evaluation suggest there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Hay...

One notebook for each kind of therapy is required and must be brought at all times during the lessons. Inside, the therapist would scribble lesson reminders, homeworks, and feedbacks of how the session went.

Parents/yayas do not usually accompany the child inside the room during the therapy session. So I placed the two notebooks inside this small plastic attache-bag for Albert to bring with him inside.

Initial evaluation is 1,500 pesos.
Each succeeding session costs 525 pesos.
Method of billing is monthly.
You have to call at least one day before your scheduled slot if your child will be absent. Unexcused absences is still billed as done.


FEEDBACK FOR TODAY:
For O.T:
Today's feedback from teacher Amy was much better. Albert is now fairly compliant with given tasks and commands presented to him. He is still easily distracted, that sometimes you have to hold his face to focus on the work at hand, and have to use a firm tone of voice to get his attention. He became talkative towards the end of the session. He was able to finish the tasks as needed, but had some difficulty in doing a 9 piece form board puzzle (the was about cars & trucks), but got around to it after teacher showed how to do it and after the 3rd to 4th round. I admit this to be true since Albert's learning style based on my observations was a mix of that of a Looker and Mover (I will feature a post about these in the days to come).

An alphabet form board puzzle. this is similar to the cars form board puzzle Albert did today

He also needed some verbal prompting to continue finding the match while doing the complex shape matching using oreo cookie matchin' middle. 

source: amazon.com

The same was also true when he was doing the 3-6 pieces interlocking puzzle. Teacher have to give him one piece of the puzzle at a time, but he did okay and finished the puzzle.

He did well with the sorting pegs for 5 basic colors  (I bought him something like this and so maybe that's why he was able to do it easily aside from the fact that he knows the RYGBO quite well already), and with matching the pictures on the form board (We also did something like this at home using the flash cards of animals and matching some of them with a small toy animal figure).

FOR S.T:
Feedback was basically the same as last week's. He still needs to work on verbally naming and recognizing household & toiletries items (cabinet, shower, mirror, toothpaste, towel, etc.), clothes (jacket, cap etc.), action words (bath/ligo, clapping, etc.), following simple directions or commands like "put this cup under the chair", recognizing quantities like "all" "one", and answering simple open/what questions like those pertaining to body parts (practice daw using mirror). He was mostly inconsistent and needs to imitate teacher's actions to be able to follow. As to the body parts, I was quite surprised that Albert was inconsistent in naming/recognizing them since he fairly know these last year pa with school. Maybe it is not a good idea to have 2 therapy sessions one after the other in one day. He must be tired already when he goes for the speech room

I will post more pictures of the therapy center next time.


Namaste!




Therapists in Action Corp.
HELP Therapy Center
1655 Penafrancia St. Santiago Village Makati
(02) 896.5195
email:  TIAction@gmail.com