Hello and welcome! This week I will be reviewing a couple other blogs about occupational therapy, including "Monica's OT Blog" by Monica Lee and "Blank's Blog" by Serena Blank.

In Monica's blog, she writes about the use of occupational therapy with children with special needs. She loves working with children, having started by volunteering at a local church, and hopes to continue this into her future career. In her most recent post, she talks about "cognitive functional" occupational therapy, also referred to as "Cog-Fun." This is mainly used with children with ADHD. The study Monica wrote about showed that Cog-Fun was a very successful type of therapy, and was taught to parents so they could help their own children at home. Monica writes, Based on the children's TOLDX scores, which were taken before and after the intervention, the Cog-Fun program showed significant improvement in the children." I am glad to see such a success that will improve the lives of children with ADHD. Check out her blog at http://monicasotblog.blogspot.com/!

Serena's blog is about OT and handwriting. I find this incredibly interesting because this is a topic I have never seen before, but has a ton of potential and is very important. Serena says, "I have noticed that young people have lost their chance of learning the craft of handwriting, due to a shift towards a technology-based society." This is something I never thought about before and I am glad Serena is writing about it. In her mist recent post, she discusses an article about handwriting in preschool-aged children. It talks about the "Handwriting Without Tears" test or HWT. This is when a child traces over the writing of the teacher with various writing tools to learn the fine motor skills. This was shown to be very successful! It is important to Serena that children are taught proper handwriting skills from a young age, and this should be important to teachers everywhere. Her blog ishttp://serenablank.blogspot.com/! Check it out!

I am thankful to have learned so much from these two blogs!
-Emily 

Lee, M. (2015, October). Success with Cognitive-Functional Occupational Therapy [Web log post].http://monicasotblog.blogspot.com/

Blank, S. (2015, October). Occupational Therapy Interventions and Handwriting [Web log post]http://serenablank.blogspot.com/