Skye Therapy

22/11/2025

“They’re just playing” ❌
“They’re growing as they play” ✅

Sometimes as an paediatric occupational therapist I hear “it looks like you’re just playing”. The truth is my style of therapy often involves lots of play, but it’s never JUST playing. Play is the work of childhood. Play is joyful and engaging, and depending on the child and the goal it can be the most effective modality for learning and growth.

As a therapist I am never JUST playing - There’s constant assessing, co-regulating, adjusting, responding, problem solving and coaching according to the specific needs of the child and family in front of me. All of our play is specifically cultivated to promote engagement and skill development towards our client’s specific goals related to the activities they need and want to do on their daily life. So my brain is firing on all cylinders for the full 45 or 60 minutes I’m in a therapy session. AND then there’s all the work outside the session we do that you don’t see - the parent coaching, the teacher collaboration, the resource creation, research around the latest evidence base in literature, the problem solving, the note taking, and session planning.

Therapy should be fun so I love when parents, teachers and kids think that our therapy sessions are fun, but play in therapy is not JUST fun it’s also hard work!

18/11/2025

Wobble cushions (aka Move’n’sit sit cushions) can be a helpful tool to place on a chair or the floor for a child to sit on help with increasing attention and making sitting down more bearable for children who need lots o f movement. Wobble cushions provide additional proprioceptive input (input through the muscles and joints) which sensory seekers or those undersensitive to proprioceptive input need to stay calm, alert and engaged.

A word of caution though: for children with low tone, low core strength or low balance wobble cushions can be more harm than help if used for too long at one time. This is as when their muscle endurance and balance is challenged too much it can tip the child’s nervous system towards a sense of “protection” (meaning the fight, fright, flight, freeze or fawn state of activated) rather than a sense of felt safety (which is essential for regulation and good attention).

If you’re not sure if a wobble cushion is the right fit for you child’s sensory and attention needs we recommend an individualised assessment and advice from an OT to work out the right sensory strategies and tools.

14/11/2025

Why do I do occupational therapy? Because it matters and because it’s fun!

It matters that children can do the things they need to and want to do in their everyday life - even with differences, delays or disabilities. It matters that they can access the right supports to build their skills, use the best strategies and resources to compensate for differences, and be provided with the adjustments they need. It matters that parents are confident and equipped with the right tools they to guide their child’s unique development.

AND it’s so fun to bring joy, giggles and play to the therapy process! I love that my days are spent playing with teddies, trucks and Lego; doing puzzles, blowing bubbles, cartwheels on the lawn, kicking balls around, treasure maps, pirate missions, Bayblade battles, silly stories about Pokémon, baking brownies, jumping on trampolines and daggy jokes!!

Being a paediatric occupational therapist in some ways is a calling for me. It matters and makes my heart sing 🧸🧩🤸‍♂️ 🗺️💛

- Jessie Ellis, Paediatric Occupational Therapist

10/11/2025

04/11/2025

Visual timers can be great tools to support attention by extending task engagement and indicating transitions.

30/10/2025

🐍🧸Weighted toys provided deep pressure input which can help the body and nervous system calm. It can be useful for supporting regulation and act as a tool for grounding when feeling anxious, stressed or fidgety. We find weighted toys are particularly helpful for people that are under sensitive to proprioceptive (body awareness) input.

28/10/2025

⛈️Coregulate before self-regulating ⛅️Coregulation experiences are a foundational step to building self-regulation skills. Children first need plenty of experiences of handling and calming down from big emotions and uncomfortable feelings with a safe person modelling and supporting them, before they can start to use those skills by themselves.

To help your child to cope with and manage their emotions be with them in the feeling, model what it looks like to understand the feeling and practice feeling better together.

27/10/2025

Your child is not giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time.

25/10/2025

When life gives you more life - there’s Occupational Therapy.

21/10/2025

All behaviour reveals something about a child’s needs, wants, thoughts, feelings or regulation in that moment. As paediatric occupational therapists we spend a lot of our day thinking and helping parents and teachers to ask: “I wonder what this behaviour is communicating about this child in this situation?”