The Brushing Program

The Wilbarger Brushing Protocol is used as part of a Sensory Diet to help a child with sensory defensiveness (oversensitive to sensory information). This brushing protocol stimulates the nerve endings and “primes” or “prepares” the child to interpret sensory information. The brush provides a particular amount of pressure and the strokes are performed in such [...]

The Listening Program

The Listening Program (TLP) is a music-based stimulation program that assists children with auditory processing, listening, and attention skills. During OT sessions, a child may wear headphones with classical music that is named “sensory integration” or “speech.”  These CDs are used in an informal way and can be taken off after one minute if the [...]

Alert Program

“How does your engine run?” The Alert Program “How does your engine run?” is a program that uses an engine picture to describe how a child feels in the moment, and their ability to “self regulate”.  Self regulate is the ability to change your alertness or arousal level to the demands of a situation. An [...]

Astronaut Training

Astronaut Training is a treatment protocol for improving visual-auditory-vestibular integration developed by Mary J. Kawar, MS, OTR. The protocol is designed to stimulate and integrate the vestibular, auditory and visual systems. It is a child-friendly approach that utilizes rotary input (spinning) to elicit reflexive eye movements (nystagmus), which “warms up” the eyes for subsequent focused [...]

What Is Sensory Integration?

By Lena Winston, OTR/L, SIPT Sensory integration is the organization of information we get from our environment. It is the ability to receive and process information from all of the senses: touch, movement, smell, taste, vision, and hearing; organize that information within the brain; then respond in a meaningful way. Sensory integration provides the foundation [...]

What is PROMPT?

PROMPT is an acronym for Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets. The technique is a tactile-kinesthetic approach that uses touch cues to a patient’s articulators (jaw, tongue, lips) to manually guide them through a targeted word, phrase or sentence. Therapists begin by helping patients produce certain phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest increment of [...]