http://www.blueskiestherapies.com/

Blue Skies Therapies, Grand Haven, MI (2025)

09/10/2024

Grand Rapids Kids is looking for your help to find the best family medical professionals in West Michigan! Blue Skies Therapies is honored to be nominated in both the Speech and Occupational Therapy categories! 🎉🌟

Our team is so honored to work alongside you and your children. We are so thankful for your support! 💛 Voting is open through September 25th and linked below:

https://grkids.com/vote-for-favorite-grand-rapids-family-care-practitioners/

02/05/2024

Have you heard?? We are now offering Occupational Therapy Services! 🎉

Wondering if occupational therapy could benefit your child? Here are just a few areas occupational therapy can support:

•Coordination & strength; including fine, gross and ocular motor ability
•Body awareness, through improved motor planning skills and posture habits
•Sensory system discovery by working through touch, smell, position in space, balance, sight and hearing

Blue Skies Therapies will create a customized treatment plan to build your child's self regulation skills & empower your child to increase independence in daily activities!

Interested in learning more? Reach out for your free consultation today!

01/31/2024

Honored and excited to have to have made Top Docs list as one of the best speech therapists in West Michigan. A huge thank you to all of our families and friends for supporting Blue Skies Therapies. We are so grateful to be acknowledged for the hard work and quality of care that we strive to provide on a daily basis. 💛

01/01/2024

We are so excited to begin another year with each of you! Our hearts are filled with gratitude and excitement as we head into a brand new year!

12/25/2023

Wishing all of our friends a very Merry Christmas!

12/22/2023

Just a reminder that Blue Skies Therapies will not have any therapy sessions from Monday, December 25th through Monday, January 1st! We will resume our regular schedule on Tuesday, January 2nd!

12/15/2023

Still looking for last minute gifts? These are a few of our favorite things! Take a peek at some of our most loved and used toys & games from our therapy sessions in 2023!

12/05/2023

Last (in this series of posts) but definitely not least: Play and Engagement. As Maria Montessori said, "Play is the work of the child" and here at Blue Skies Therapies, we believe that to be true! Play serves an important role in the development of the whole child.

11/28/2023

Executive Functioning is such a broad category that so many skills fall into! Here are just some of the areas of executive functioning:

🧠 Planning and/or sequencing of tasks
🧠 Following through on directions, tasks, or sequences
🧠 Problem Solving
🧠 Organizing ideas and thoughts
🧠 Activities of Daily Living
🧠 Time management
🧠 Attention to task
🧠 Memory and Processing of information

11/23/2023

Happy Thanksgiving, friends! Hoping your hearts (and bellies) are filled with the goodness and thankfulness that this season brings us. We are so thankful for you!

11/16/2023

Voice and fluency disorders are just another important area of speech therapy! In fluency therapy, the SLP works with the individual in order to develop confidence when speaking as well as strategies to manage moments of disfluency within their everyday speech! We believe it is our job in speech therapy to develop confident communicators!

11/13/2023

"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
- Leo Buscaglia

11/07/2023

You may not realize hat feeding and swallowing skills are yet another area that is addressed in speech therapy! Here are just a few examples of feeding and swallowing skills:

🍴Increasing interaction and tolerance towards food(s) or food groups your child does not currently interact with or eat in order to increase their overall food inventory.

🍴Pacing while eating or drinking. You may notice your child stuffing food into their mouth, taking too big or too small of bites, or holding food in their cheeks (pocketing), or even taking a long time to complete a meal.

🍴 Drinking from a variety of cup types without spilling, coughing, or maybe even choking. You may also notice your child bites down on their cup or straw. We work on this too!

🍴Increasing the strength and mobility of the tongue or the coordination of the chewing in order to increase the consistency of chewing or moving food throughout the oral cavity.

10/31/2023

Happy Halloween from Blue Skies Therapies! 🎃👻🍬

10/29/2023

Social Pragmatic Language encompass a wide variety of skill areas that help a child (or individual) interact with and navigate through a their functional environments. Here are just a few examples of social skills that are often addressed in therapy:

🔁 Turn taking in play encompasses sharing, fairness, and making sure that both play partners are involved with the activity.

👀 Joint (shared) attention and eye contact allows a social partner to know that you are both thinking about or working the same thing. Eye contact allows a social partner to know that they are being heard.

👥 Reciprocity in conversation works to include both social partners in the conversation. Areas include: topic maintenance, related questions, related comments, not stealing the conversation, interruption strategies, joining a conversation, initiating a conversation, and knowing when to end a conversation.

🧍Interpreting non-verbal language or body language incorporates understanding facial expressions or determining body language and what it is communicating about how the other person is feeling or what they are thinkin.

🔹 Perspective taking allows for another person's point of view or ideas to be acknowledge or understood.

🤔 Interpreting emotions of others often incorporates perspective taking skills in addition to interpreting non-verbal language. Interpreting emotions of others helps to understand more of what a social partner in is feeling.

🔎 Problem solving occurs when something unexpected or unwanted occurs and modifications need to be made. Problem solving can include: determining the size of the problem, matching a size of reaction, and coming up with solutions.

🚨 Emotional responses allow for an individual to understand their own emotions, how emotions vary or change across situations, and how to express their emotions.

🤝 Flexibility and compromise works to come to a mutual agreement that meets the needs of all social partners.

10/23/2023

Looking for ways to sort out or use your candy after Halloween? Here are some tips and tricks for ways to involve your child in sorting out their candy while incorporating speech and language skills!

🍬Categorize the candy by the color of their wrappers! Try using a muffin tin with one color in each spot! Or try a small bowl for each color (if you need more space). If you want to match colors, use different colored paper that match the color of the wrappers!

🍫 Sort the candy by type or kind! Pair all of the same kinds of candy together! For example, all the M&Ms together, all the gummies together, etc.

🍭 Arrange the candy by size. Sort in to piles of small candy or big candy. Try making a line of candy, going smallest to biggest or biggest to smallest.

🍬 Taste different flavors of the candy. Try something sweet, try something sour, try something salty!

🍫 Feel different textures of the candy. Textures could include: hard, squishy, sticky, bumpy, smooth. First try feeling the textures with a finger then try with your tongue or teeth!

10/17/2023

Expressive Language Delays occur when a child demonstrates a difficulty verbally communicating their thoughts, ideas, questions or needs. Expressive language skills represent the child's use of spoken language and not their ability to understand (that is their receptive language)!

Expressive language delays can look different, depending on the age of your child. Here are some examples of expressive language skills:

🗣️ Object and picture naming

🗣️ Growing Word Inventory (how many words your child uses consistently)

🗣️Pairing words together to ask questions or answer questions

🗣️ Ability to communicate wants and needs verbally

🗣️ Sentence formation and using differing parts of speech

🗣️Participating in a reciprocal conversation

🗣️Telling a story or being able to retell a story

🗣️ Presenting thoughts in a sequential order

🗣️Describing attributes or details of objects, pictures, or stories

10/14/2023

As you prepare for trick-or-treating here are a few helpful tricks and tips to consider:

🎃 Ask your child if they would prefer to hand out candy from home, go trick-or-treating, or maybe do both!

🎃 Schedule a time (even before the day of Halloween) to practice trick-or treating. This could be at a trunk-or-treat, Halloween event, or even at family members' homes.

🎃 Start with houses that are familiar to your child such as family members, friends, or neighbors.

🎃 Do not feel tied to the of trick-or-treating hours. Consider decreasing trick-or-treating time by checking in often with your child, determining the amount of time prior to going out, or having a set amount of houses that you will visit before coming back home.

🎃 Consider choosing an alternate activity for the night of Halloween if your child is uninterested in trick-or-treating. For example, watching a movie, having a bonfire, making a fall craft, going out to eat, having an "in home" trick or treat, etc.

Blue Skies Therapies

09/10/2024

02/05/2024

01/31/2024

01/01/2024

12/25/2023

12/22/2023

12/15/2023

12/05/2023

11/28/2023

11/23/2023

11/16/2023

11/13/2023

11/07/2023

10/31/2023

10/29/2023

10/23/2023

10/17/2023

10/14/2023

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