Saturday, February 21, 2009

Educational Conference



The ADVANCE Society & the Learning Resource Center are glad to announce their ninth annual educational conference under the theme of: "Road Map to Positive Behavior," from 19th to 21st March, 2009, hosted by the British InternationalSchool in Cairo (BISC)


Our conference this year, "Road Map to Positive Behavior," will cover the following seven streams:

1. Parenting with Positive Behavior Support

2. Behavioral Disorders in Preschool Children

3. Effective Strategies for Behavioral Management in Schools

4. Emotional and Behavioral Challenges

5. Behaviors of Children with Sensory and/Or Motor Difficulties

6. Correlation between Communication Difficulties and Behavior

7. Health and Related Behaviors


We are happy to announce that we have 4 occupational therapists presenting this year. The following are abstracts of these workshops & lectures:


Importance of Seating for Enhancing Adaptive Function Cerebral Palsy (Presented in English)

Lecturer: Angela Pilski

Précis : Teachers and Therapists strive to provide excellent treatment and care, only to place the child into inadequate and often harmful Seating. Good Seating should act as an extension of Therapy and, combined with Sleep Positioning Systems, provide a 24 hour management of Spasticity. It also assists with autonomic functions such as breathing and maintains good health. It reduces absenteeism in educational programs, and allows the child to sit longer with less fatigue, improves functional use of extremities, and generally allows the child to make eye contact. Good seating improves the appearance of children to the point where it might make the difference between them attending mainstream school or not. There are many techniques and systems that have been developed to assist Therapists. Seating is, however, considered to be a specialty in Europe and North America, where specialized centers have Rehabilitation Engineers as well as Therapists who are skilled in a wide variety of modalities. Raising the awareness of the need for good Seating will hopefully provide comfort to a population who are often not able to speak for themselves. This lecture will demonstrate the need to sit well with the intrinsic spinal curves in place and address how that affects vision and upper extremity function, and how mobility affects learning.


Handwriting! I hate it! (Presented in English)

Lecturer: Farah Sabra

    Précis : “My daughter is very bright and inquisitive. Now they started teaching cursive at school and she hates it!”

    “I am a teacher and my 4 year old student throws markers away and cries when attempting to write”.

Handwriting is an integral part of every child’s school experience. Some students have difficulty in the production of legible handwriting. Negative behaviors might result from handwriting difficulties (i.e. crying, pulling away, tantrums, throwing writing utensils, withdrawal and giving up). Many factors contribute to illegible writing. It is necessary for teachers and parents to understand the factors underlying the skill of handwriting in order to address difficulties and decrease negative behaviors resulting from them. This workshop will address these issues by discussing the principal components necessary for developing writing skills and activities to develop these components.


Understanding Sensory Challenges (Presented in English)

Lecturer: Fatima Chehouri-Nasser

Précis : Professionals are often faced with the challenging question of whether the child's current behavioral problems are just tantrums or are related to other underlying sensory deficits. Occupational therapists are trained to make functional observations in all aspects of the child's life--at school, in the home environment, at play--as well as to detect and further assess sensory deficits. Scientific research in the area of sensory integration and sensory dysfunction has shown that children with sensory processing difficulties exhibit problems in behavior such as aggressiveness, inattention, distractibility and defiance. It is important to identify the difference so that the proper strategies can be used to decrease and/or eliminate the unwanted behaviors, thus increasing the chances for optimal learning.

Sensory Challenges (Presented in Arabic)

Presenter: Majdi Bzoor

Precis: How being hypersensitive and/or hyposensitive in relation to one's senses can affect a child's behavior.

For more information on how to register please call Yasser Salah at the Learning Resource Center, Tel: (+202) 25163965 or 67 or e-mail: lrcttc@yahoo.com

Thank you and I hope many can attend this conference.

Laura

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Updates

Sue Hartshorne has resigned her role as the WFOT Ambassador to the Egypt Project. However, Sue continues to work in Egypt and supports the development of OT in the country. Members of the CDOTE and the WFOT thank her for her contributions. The WFOT Executive Management Team have agreed that the ambassador position is now no longer required. We all look forward to progress continuing through the Committee to Develop OT in Egypt (CDOTE). The WFOT have reported that they will continue to monitor the situation via the Egypt Project led by Christiane Mentrup and look forward to being approached in the future with an application for an educational programme approval and hopefully ultimately membership of WFOT.

 

The next CDOTE Meeting:


Wednesday, February 25th at 4:30pm 

at the

 Learning Resource Center. 


New members: please contact myself or any of the CDOTE members if you would like to attend. 

 



Tuesday, February 10, 2009

OT Educational Programs Update

At this point, there are unfortunately no new developments with Ain Sham's and 6th October University starting their OT educational programs.

Arab OT Newsletter

I am collecting information regarding OT related topics from the OT's in Egypt, so if anyone would like to contribute to the next newsletter please let me know. These topics will be compiled with other entries from OT's in the Arab region. Topics may include, but are not limited to research, program development, job availabilities, conferences, workshops, treatment techniques etc.

Thanks,
Laura

Posting Comments....

Many times I receive comments on various entries, which are well worth reading and responding to; however, many times those commenting do not leave their contact information. I usually respond directly to that entry, but that will only go on the blog and not directly to the person who messaged.

So, please leave your contact information when posting comments!

Thanks,
Laura