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charanderson -> Re: The other SI (July 17, 2000 4:26:00 PM)
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Gerry,
I am excited that you asked! I live and work in Southern California, so of course I know about SI. It is almost a prerequisite for a peds job out here.
The book I got when I took my 8 week course was Sensory Integration: Theory and Practice by Anne G. Fisher et al. Publisher F.A. Davis Company in Philadelphia. I believe it is an essential textbook.
Bonnie Hanschu has some excellent courses, integrating her READY approach with SI. I think this can be integrated with PT in a very practical way, even more so than straight SI.
The way that I have found SI to be most useful in my practice was that it gave my student's nervous system the information that it needed in order to "listen" to the PT information that I wanted to give it.
My most successful case recently, integrating SI, was with a very intelligent sweet boy with Autism. He was also low tone, with poor coordination and motor planning. Unfortunately, because of the Autistic behaviors, I couldn't see the other "PT" problems. They were going through a law suit with the school district over services and I was very glad that I didn't have to testify. Fortunately his old PT did. He was my most challenging case!
It took a couple of months of SI and getting to know how to connect with him, to get to his PT challenges. First, I had to let go of my preconceived notions of what a PT session should include. Then if I could do 10-15 minutes of PT related activities, then I was happy. Toward the end, not only was the majority of the session PT activities, I was able to teach a PT student in two sessions how to work with him so that he also got a lot of PT work out of him. I believe that the key to SI is to always be thinking and observing within the SI model and to take opportunities to provide the imput that they need in a child centered play mode and to strive for the "Adaptive Response. The weakness of the model, that I have seen, is that sometimes it looks like it can end up just as child centered play, Nice but not what we should be paid for.
I have also experienced SI on a personal level. My son had some relatively mild developmental delay and SI issues. I believe that the SI trained OT and my own knowledge of SI really made a difference to his life and his future. Although interestingly enough my husband made a huge difference as well. He was unaware of SI theory, but was an intuitive parent and a bit pushy (but in a good way). He got my son out in the sand, he rough housed with him and quite frankly toughened him up a bit!
I have even added parental rough housing (preferably the father)and a few guidelines for success as a home program for other children since observing the success of my husband. Is it just me, or have others noticed that the father seems to get less involved and plays less in a typically fatherly way, with disabled children? I think that this is a home program gold mine here!
Just an added thought!
Charlene [URL=http://www.smarttiming.com]http://www.smarttiming.com[/URL]
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