Also, I am such a novice, but I'm wondering, how time-consuming is OT? It would be great to know what kinds of things they actually do in OT?
When our ds had handwriting OT, he went in to the OT's office for one hour per week for approximately 9 months. His OT didn't give us any exercises to do at home, but fwiw - he didn't have what I would consider to be a great OT. Our dd10 has been through vision therapy and sensory OT and for both of those I was given a lot of input at each visit re her challenges and functioning and we were given assignments to do each day at home to be support the in-office therapy sessions.
I need to think a bit to remember for sure what types of exercises our ds did while he was at OT - he did do a bit of gross motor for warm-up even though fine motor was the focus of his therapy. They worked on handwriting each day plus finger and wrist strengthening exercises. The handwriting work started out with correct posture and pencil grip, followed by practice to learn how to correctly form the letters, practice to even out pencil pressure on the paper, and experimenting with different types of grips etc. FWIW, not all of what ds learned in OT stuck. He forgot how to form his letters within probably weeks. His legibility improved a lot, and stayed improved for probably 2 years, but it's started to deteriorate again every so slightly, which I think is partially related to relying on typing for almost all of his work. His corrected pencil grip has stayed with him as well as his improved posture while writing.
I'm going to try to remember some of the hand-strengthening exercises that they did and will be back to post about them. FWIW, I think a lot of what they worked on could be done at home if time/$/finding an OT was a concern. One option we were offered was to bring ds in for the initial OT evaluation, then have the OT put together an OT plan for us to work on at home, and we'd check in about once a month.
polarbear
