Here Comes the Sun ?
Welcome to our summer newsletter! We are so fortunate to live and work in a city like Adelaide, with clean air and easy access to beautiful parks, beaches and forests, and to have our lovely backyard at My Therapy House available for sessions in the sandpit and cubby house.
In this newsletter, we have some fun beach-themed activities from Leila and Edwina, our fabulous graduate students who are finishing up their final placements with us. ?? We wish them all the very best as they take the next steps in their careers: Leila as an Occupational Therapist and Edwina as a Speech Pathologist.
Director’s Reflections
What a dynamic year it’s been. Thank you to all the children and the parents for making our lives so rewarding. We love working with your children and seeing the wonderful gains they make every week!
This year most of our therapy staff received training in Neurolinguistic programming – an approach to help us support families even better. We established our new website and launched various programs to improve access to our different services.
We launched our parent programs, which include supporting parents in their personal development and teaching them strategies to support their relationship with their children.
We also launched our podcast, The Empowered Parent with Dana Baltutis, to help parents access information from different parenting experts from Australia and overseas.
Dana has been working closely with many parents and is starting to have more of an online presence.
We had two significant celebrations in the My Therapy House family with Isabela’s and Henk’s wedding and Charlotte’s and Jason’s baby coming into this world.
We launched our new website with beautiful new photos of some of our families as well as a video to help people understand what we do.
Our staff grew with Purphy and Neetha joining our team.
Our motto for 2025 is ‘simplify‘. This means we are going to work hard to simplify our processes and documentation to make our services even more accessible for parents and children.
We are going to continue to expand our online presence via social media, online courses and parent groups to establish a supportive Empowered Parent Community.
The My Therapy House team wishes everyone a restful break, and we look forward to seeing you all back in the new year!
❤ Dana
Staff Changes
Kerry will be reducing her days to Thursdays and Fridays only in 2025.
Rose is leaving My Therapy House to work with other Play Therapists. Her last day is Wednesday 18th December. We wish Rose well as she pursues her dream!
Around the House
New Programs
In 2025 we are planning some additions to our programs for the school holidays. Stay tuned for more details!
Infection Control
We are no longer sending health declaration forms before each session. If you or your child is unwell, please contact Reception as soon as possible to arrange a rescheduled session if we have availability or to discuss other service provision options.
Do not visit the clinic if you have flu-like or cold-like symptoms. These include runny nose, sore throat, coughing, sneezing, difficulty breathing, headache, stomach ache, nausea or diarrhoea. Call the clinic if you are unsure whether you or your children are well enough to attend.
Summer Fun Activities
Leila (Occupational Therapy Student) and Edwina (Speech Pathology Student) have come up with some wonderful activities that can be done at home with your child during the holidays. Beach-themed craft is perfect for summer and growing and developing your child’s skills! In this activity, you and your child can cut out images, glue them onto the storyboard, draw, colour in, and take turns telling stories about your dream beach adventure, then visit the beach and act out your story!
Tell a Beach Story
You will need:
- Printed copies of the beach background below
- Printed copies of the beach items
- Colouring materials – crayons, pencils, markers
- Scissors
- Glue or sticky tape
- Other decoration ideas – sand, coloured paper, grass, leaves
What to Do:
- Cut out the small pictures.
- Stick the small pictures on the background to build your story.
- Tell each other your story using the pictures you stuck to your background.
- Colour in your story picture.
You can make up lots of different stories. You might like to glue extra decorations to your story or laminate the coloured-in background and small pictures to re-use them for different stories. We would love to see your creations and hear your stories!
Speech Pathology In This Activity
As your child creates their craft, you can create a storyline together! Your child can have a go at creating their own narrative about the image they make. Narratives can vary depending on your child, for example:
Stages of narrative development:
- Naming the objects and actions in the image (e.g. fish, swim, drive, crab)
- Focusing on the major characters and organising the story around their actions.
- Introducing time into the story (e.g. before, after), begins to use “because” (e.g. they fell over because…)
- Understanding primary emotions (e.g. happy, sad, scared, surprised). Having an awareness of the goal-directed behaviour of characters (e.g. a character has a goal, and they have a plan).
- Understands more emotions (e.g. guilt, jealousy, embarrassment). Begins to understand the relationship between different characters.
To help your child grow their vocabulary, you can name what they are doing as they are making their craft. For example:
- Action words: cut, stick, draw, colour, roll
- Describing words: soft, long, short, big, small, new, old, colour words (blue, red, etc)
- Location words: on top, above, below, under, in, out, behind, next to, in front of, in between
- Feeling words: frustrated, excited, happy, tired, sad, angry, confused
- Social words: help me, please, thank you, your turn, my turn, yes, no
You can also practise following instructions with your child. For example, instructions like “cut out the shell” allow your child to practise one-step instructions and “cut out the shell, then stick it down” allows your child to practise two-step instructions. Remember to break up the instructions if your child needs support or model it to them to show how it’s done!
Occupational Therapy In This Activity
Fine Motor Skills: This activity helps your child develop fine motor skills through drawing, colouring, and cutting out images, enhancing hand-eye coordination and dexterity.
Judgement: Children exercise judgment when cutting out items, assessing the shape and size of each icon for precise cutting.
Gross Motor Skills, Strength, and Coordination: Sitting at a table and maintaining an upright position in their chair requires core strength and coordination, essential for overall motor development.
Visual Perception: This activity encourages visual perception by requiring children to recognise and differentiate between similar objects, aiding in their ability to identify and categorise shapes.
Sensory Processing: Engaging with various textures (like paper and colouring materials) and the action of cutting provides sensory input that can enhance tactile awareness. The vibrant colours also stimulate the visual senses, promoting the exploration of colours and creativity.
Here’s our storyboard!
A Visit to the Beach
How do we support children’s development in our everyday lives?
Going to the beach can be a fantastic activity that supports children’s development. Wonderful capacity-building happens right before our eyes, often without us realising it. The beach provides countless opportunities for children to grow, learn, and play in a natural, sensory-rich environment.
We would like to highlight some of the benefits of spending time at the beach.
Occupational Therapy Skills at the Beach
Playing in the sand and building sandcastles encourages creativity, problem-solving, and fine motor skills as children shape and decorate their creations. It also supports gross motor skills, with digging, carrying, and patting down sand requiring strength and coordination. Being on all fours while scooping and balancing helps develop core strength, as the resistance of the sand engages their muscles in different positions.
Playing in the water at the beach offers many developmental benefits for children. It sparks creativity as they splash and explore waves, enhances problem-solving skills as they figure out how to float objects, and promotes gross motor skills through swimming and jumping. Fine motor skills are developed by manipulating beach toys while balancing in the water helps improve core strength.
Speech Pathology Skills at the Beach
When you’re at the beach, you can continue to build your child’s vocabulary by naming things that you can see or that George can see; for example, George can see “water”, “sand”, “jetty”, “sun tent”, “bushes” and “seaweed”. You can use the examples in the diagram below to name actions, feelings, locations and more.
You can also build on your child’s sentence structure, using sentences that your child will be able to understand, here are some examples!
- “George looking at water” or “George sitting on sand”
- “George is looking at the water” or “George is sitting on the sand”
- “George is looking at the blue water” or “George is sitting on the warm sand”
Modelling sentences for your child will help them to grow their sentence structure skills and grow their vocabulary as you expose them to new words.
Here’s a reading of ‘Day At The Beach’ to get you in the mood for some fun in the sun!
My Therapy House – The Play House
Acclaimed Australian author Phil Cummings has written a special book for us, beautifully illustrated by Egle Gudonyte, that we hope will help families and children when they come to My Therapy House. You can read the book on our website here and download a copy to print at home.
Our eBooks
My Therapy House has published a series of 12 e-books about animals performing different actions to help children learn language concepts through music and play.
When you buy any of the eBooks, you can access the video corresponding to that particular book with animal puppets performing the actions with the music and song. These videos have been very popular for modelling the actions and songs for children who learn best through video footage and music.
You can purchase these books through the links here.
NDIS News
If you use a Plan Manager to look after NDIS invoice payments, then you need to ensure that you stay on top of communication with them. When NDIS Plans reach their review date, some plans are extended and others are rolled over onto a new plan with new dates. Your Plan Manager may not be able to process our invoices if you have not authorised them to do so after a plan change. You should also notify My Therapy House of new NDIS Plan dates after any plan changes.
You can keep up with any changes to the NDIS Plans you manage by logging in to the My Place portal.
Information about the My Place portal is available on the NDIS Website, here.
Medicare Safety Net
If you need to see a doctor or Medicare provider regularly, the Medicare Safety Net could help you reduce out-of-pocket costs.
When you spend more than a certain amount, out-of-pocket (after any Medicare rebate has been reimbursed), on medical expenses in a calendar year you will get a higher rebate. You can also register as a family to combine your Safety Nets. Safety Nets are calculated from January 1st to December 31st each year.
Using the Express Plus Medicare app can make it easier to keep track of your Safety Net Threshold. It also allows you to store a digital copy of your Medicare Card, make claims if a provider’s EFTPOS machine is offline, and access immunisation history for yourself and your children under 14.
To use the app you will need your MyGov login details and your Medicare Card number and expiry date.
Social Media
We post general information, news, and interesting articles on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. This is a great way to get the bigger picture, and we’d love you to follow our pages to see what we share.
