Our Care
What Makes Us Unique?
The team is carefully hand-picked for their character traits, years of relevant experience, commitment to family empowerment, and knowledge of the intervention approaches in building and facilitating Regulation, Organisation and Motivation (ROM) to achieve Occupational Engagement, to result in a change in behaviors.
What are Occupations?
Occupations refers to everything that one has to do in daily life. Each of us have various occupations which are essential to our health and well-being. Occupations can be categorized as self-care, education, sleep/rest, play, leisure and social participation activities.
The following table displays some of the occupations a child or adolescent engages in, at different life stages:
Life Stage | Occupations |
Early Childhood 0-6 years | Self-care · Learning to dress/undress · Engage in self-feeding, getting themselves a drink or snack · Manage lunch box at school · Carry out toileting independently or seek help when necessary
Education · Engage in lessons during story time, show-and-tell, table top tasks · Learning to write, handwriting becomes more skilled as fine motor skills improves
Play and leisure · Engage in different types of play (starting with parallel play then progressing to associative and cooperative play) · Engage in simple sports and crafts as leisure activities
Social participation · Develop friendships with peers or playmates at playgroups, daycare or kindergarten
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School Age 7-12 years
| Self-care · Independent in self-care activities such as dressing, toileting · Able to get themselves ready for school · Can prepare simple snacks such as preparing a toast · Demonstrates safety awareness across situations
Education · Able to sit longer in class due to longer attention span and increased memory capacity
Play and leisure · Engage in play which are rule-based and requires problem solving skills · Engage in sports which require a higher level of physical capabilities e.g. team sports and Physical Education (PE) classes · More skilled in arts and crafts activities due to improved fine motor skills
Social participation · Spend a larger proportion of time interacting with peers and teachers in school · Often turn to friends or siblings for social support · Develop friendships through social groups i.e. CCA groups, sports club
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Adolescent 13-19 years | Self-care · Likely to engage in new grooming activities e.g. applying make-up, shaving, styling of hair · Takes public transport in the community independently · Prepares food independently · Manages finances independently or to a certain extent
Education · Able to juggle multiple academic subjects and classes taken
Play and leisure · With greater autonomy, engages in structured (team sports, art, classes) and unstructured (watching of movies, window shopping, reading magazine) hobbies
Social participation · Social groups expand to include peers who also engage in structured or unstructured leisure groups. May also participate in groups which align to their own interests or beliefs such as in environmental conservation
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What is Occupational Engagement?
Occupational Engagement is the performance of occupations as a result of choice, motivation and meaning within a supportive context.
Why is Occupational Engagement important for Improving Behaviours?
Occupations are essential for a child’s development and independence. An engaged child in his/her occupations can be described as enthusiastic and motivated in working hard to achieve the goal. Engaged children also demonstrate a sense of mastery and belief in their abilities, which contribute to their perseverance in the task.
We believe in educating parents about the importance and facilitation of occupational engagement so that behaviours and performance component skills such as motor skills or cognition can be improved. It is not effective enough to remediate the performance component skills alone ( such as motor skills, speech articulation, phonetic awareness, social skills). Ultimately, facilitation of the ROM process and achievement of Occupational Engagement is the change agent in the child’s behaviours.
Using Occupations to target Performance Component Skills
Cornerstone therapists may work on an occupation directly to target specific performance component skills or start off with working on underlying performance component skills that constitute the occupation. The table below shows some of the occupations and underlying skills that Cornerstone therapists may work on and how they correspond to each other:
Performance component skills | Definition | Occupations |
Fine motor | Involve small-muscle movements made with the hands and fingers. It includes finger dexterity, wrist and forearm control, and hand strength. | Writing, grasping, drawing, cutting, typing , turning pages, holding objects, buttoning clothing, shoelace tying, etc.
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Gross motor | Gross motor skills involve large (core stabilizing) muscles of the body to achieve balance and body coordination. | Standing, walking, running, jumping, sitting upright, throwing, catching, etc.
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Core Strength
| ‘Core’ refers to deep postural muscles that make up the trunk of your child’s body | To maintain good sitting posture at desk for meal times and school table top tasks etc., which in turn helps with visual perception as head is in an optimal position for copying from white board or following a line of text when reading.
Help develop a stable, supportive base for gross motor and fine motor skills.
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Sensory Processing | The way the brain receives, organises and responds to sensory input to behave in a meaningful and consistent manner. | When children are efficient in the processing of multisensory input in the environment, this is demonstrated through skill mastery, appropriate behaviour, attention and self-regulation.
Able to sit and attend to important pieces of information in class, able to understand their body’s movement in relation to surroundings and themselves which facilitate success in gross motor activities etc.
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Visual Perception
| The brain’s ability to make sense of what the eyes see | Reading, doing puzzles, copying images, matching and sorting, dressing, finding sock on the bedroom floor etc.
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Cognition
| Ability to think, reason and understand | Remembering letters, shapes and sequences, paying attention in class, problem solving etc.
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Praxis
| Involves planning and sequencing of new motor actions. It involves first generating an idea of what you want to do (ideation), figuring out how you are going to do it (motor planning) and then doing or carrying out what you wanted to do (execution).
| Required for ideation of new ideas and imaginative play etc. Ensure smooth, coordinated movements for age-appropriate sports and gross motor games as well as school and daily self-care tasks. |
Bilateral Coordination
| Ability to use both side of the body in a coordinated way.
| Using a ruler to draw a line, cutting with scissors, tying beads, riding a bike, beating a drum, jumping and skipping.
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Body Awareness
| Understanding where our bodies are in space, and where and how we move. It involves a combination of the vestibular, tactile, and proprioceptive sensory systems.
| Awareness of one’s body tells a child how far he/she needs to reach for a pencil or how close he/she is to the next person in line. Helps to avoid obstacles when walking or playing games involving movement. |
Oral motor skill
| Function and use of the lips, tongue, cheeks, jaw, and hard and soft palates in swallowing and in speaking
| Important skill for eating and drinking and speaking. |
Articulation
| Ability to physically move the mouth to produce sequence of speech sounds, which make up words and sentences.
| Important to produce clear speech which can be understood, to express basic needs and wants. Important in literacy skills such as reading and spelling out of words.
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Receptive Language
| The child’s ability to understand words and language | As children learn about the meaning of gestures and words, they can anticipate and respond to the needs of those in their environment.
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Expressive Language
| The use of words, sentences, gestures and writing to convey meaning and messages to others
| Enables children to be able to express their wants and needs, thoughts and ideas and develop language in writing and speech to engage and interact with others
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