Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg) and Speaker 2 (Kelsie Olds)
Episode 81: Strengths-Based OT and Self-Determination in Action with Kelsie Olds (‘The OccuPLAYtional Therapist’)
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. A place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life, and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell, formerly Meg Proctor, from learnplaythrive.com broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.
Meg:
Before we get started, a quick note on language. On this podcast, you’ll hear me and many of my guests use identity-affirming language. That means we say ‘Autistic person’ rather than ‘person with autism’, because this is the preference of most Autistic adults. Being Autistic is a part of their identity that they don’t need to be separated from. Join us in embracing the word ‘Autistic’ to help reduce the stigma.
Welcome to Episode 81 with Kelsie Olds, I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen posts from Kelsie’s social media, The Occuplaytional Therapist, but if not, you should join the 120,000 plus people who follow them because Kelsie’s work is so inspiring. So, Kelsie started out where most of us started, really ready to be deeply moved by our careers as therapists and with high hopes and ambitions about what this would look like. And then, sort of smacked in the face by the reality of practice. But Kelsie has tirelessly navigated practice as a school-based occupational therapist, working to bring their work into alignment with their deepest values and the care that Kelsie believes all of our clients deserve. Kelsie is a school-based OT and on the side runs their platform, The Occuplaytional Therapist, where they passionately advocate for kids to be respected in therapeutic, academic, and parenting spheres. Kelsie places a heavy emphasis on play as the primary occupation of childhood and shares theoretical information from a trauma-informed neurodiversity-affirming model, also giving lots of very practical examples of child-led play-based therapy plans and goals that they carry out every day. In this episode, we get into the really fun, relevant examples of what strengths-based OT looks like on the ground or in the school. And we get a little bit more of Kelsie’s own story as well. Even if you’re not an OT, there’s so much to learn from hearing how Kelsie practices.
And if you love learning from Kelsie Olds, you’ll be really excited to learn that they’re consulting on and helping teach part of the newest version of our continuing education course, ‘Goal Writing for Autistic Students’. This course is taught by Rachel Dorsey, we have a new version coming out soon, with a handful of consultants helping co-teach and putting their minds together on the content to make it even more relevant to OT’s, as well as relevant for SLP practice in an ongoing way. You can find the course at learnplaythrive.com/goals. Make sure you’re on our email list and we’ll let you know when the new version is ready; it will most likely be early December. And if you want just a taste of Rachel’s goal writing course, you can watch her two-hour course, ‘A Crash Course in Neurodiversity-Affirming Goal Writing’, it’s taking place live participatory on December 2nd with a recorded replay that will go on sale shortly after. You can find that at learnplaythrive.com/crashcourse. Here is the interview with Kelsie Olds.
Hi, Kelsie. Welcome to the podcast.
Kelsie:
Hi, I’m super excited to be here.
Meg:
I’m excited to have you here. I’ve been excitedly following your Facebook for a long time now and wanted to sit face-to-face with you and talk about OT for so long. And I am really excited to arrive at this moment where we get to do it and share it with everybody listening. But Kelsie, I want to start with talking about you. Could you share a bit about yourself and your personal and professional journey towards working in the way that you do?
Kelsie:
Yes. So, I have been interested in adoption, and occupational therapy, and children with disabilities as almost three points of a triad, in my mind, since I was 13-years-old. And friends of our family adopted a little girl with Down syndrome from Ukraine. And I was newly allowed to use the Internet, somewhat supervised, and they were family friends and they had a blog. And so, one of the things that I did was I followed their blog all of the time. And I thought blogs were really cool. And I loved reading, and that’s where I learned what OT was. I knew that she was receiving OT, PT, and speech. And it’s kind of where I learned a little bit about more, like, logistics of the international adoption process and things like that. And, I guess, more actualities of things that disabled people and disabled children face in the world. I can look back on, like, young childhood and see themes and things that I was interested in playing, but I got like an actual real-world glance a little bit with this stuff when I was 13. And so, to me, those things were super intertwined. I wanted to become an OT, I wanted to adopt kids with disabilities, and, you know, just like save the world because I was, like, 13, and, you know, super realistic about everything.
So, when I came into OT school, and it was, I had one pediatric class. I really only thought of OT as being a pediatric thing. I didn’t even realize that there was non-peds OT. So, that was a big shock. And then, even my pediatric class was like, memorize a list of, like, the BOT, and the theory, and the sensory profile, and what they all do, and who wrote them, and what age are they for, and like, then regurgitate these facts. And so, none of that was what I expected, or thought, or hoped for. And when I came out into practice, I sort of had some of the theory that I have now and the place that I am now as a practitioner, I had it in my heart, but I didn’t know how to do it. And I, so, I kind of just copied what little exposure I had had to actually like shadowing OT’s who are doing pediatric therapy in settings like what I was doing. And it was way more of being the handwriting teacher than I was expecting. I didn’t really have any particular passion for, like, hands specifically. I had thought that OT would be like, related to like — well, I mean, I wouldn’t have used the jargon but now I can, the occupations that are meaningful to people in their life, that was the thing that drew me to the field. And then when I came out and was like, okay, I’m supposed to teach everybody how to write the letter B, and D, and not reverse them, then that wasn’t what I was expecting to have to do. And I worked kind of unusual jobs early on in my practice; I was working just PRN, like, 50 different places at the same time. So, I didn’t have a good chance to get into much of like a swing of what kind of practitioner I wanted to be because I was kind of just trying to, like, survive, and get experience everywhere. So, it was helpful in a lot of ways.
But the one setting that was really, really impactful was that I was working in a group foster home for older children and teens who had such significant support needs that they could not be placed in a foster family home, one family environment would be the ideal. Instead, they were in like a care facility that would, that could have 24-hour staff and care and staff changes. But of course, all of that was like very retraumatizing in a lot of ways because, you know, they’re kids who have already gone through abandonment things, and, you know, like multiple complex traumas over and over on top of medical needs, and then the closest thing that they have to like a familial relationship is their favorite staff member for eight hours a day at most, you know, and then probably has the weekends off. And so, like, me coming into this, with only — though, this was the only like, unusual or emergent practice setting that I was doing, and everything else was just like normal therapy, what you think of when you think of where the state of OT is at right now. And none of my, quote unquote, ‘normal stuff’ was working, you know. I couldn’t ever, like, none of them could write, like, at all, or tolerate holding a pencil, or be in a school room with other kids. It was extreme level of need. And they were like, you know, can we do some handwriting goals and some, you know, and I was like, I mean, if I offered them a pencil to hold, they’d throw it and run away. There’s nothing I can do with Handwriting Without Tears that’s gonna solve that, you know?
And then, the funding changed a lot over the time that I was there. And so, what I could do kept changing. So, I was supposed to first see all the kids. And then, I was only supposed to pick the three who needed it the most. And like, how do I even do that? And it was a mess. But I wanted to keep showing up because I wanted to not be another practitioner who just bailed on these kids’ lives. And so, I was doing just kind of group sessions with sort of a sensory-rich, play-based, as child-led as I could get it, activity offer invitation. And I had to bring everything with me into the facility. And it could only be some things. I couldn’t bring things that could be dangerous in any way. But so, I would bring all the materials needed for one big set up activity, and then I would set up the big activity out in the open where any of the kids could come join or could leave if they wanted, you know, when they got tired of it. That was the first actual practical application of this thing in my heart that I didn’t have anyone who I knew to look to, to learn how to do it. And so, I felt like I was very much making it up as I went after having just graduated with all this stuff about, like, evidence-based practice and like not only should you do everything evidence-based, but also even if the evidence is like one case study, don’t do that, because that’s not enough case studies, you got to do things that have, you know, meta-analyses and stuff like that. And so, and then, here I am, like, it’s fall. So, what if I bring all of the spices that I can think of, and a big can of pumpkin, and all of the spatulas and spoons that I have in my kitchen, and several bowls, and then we all scoop it and mix it together and make potions that smell like fall, and talk about fall, and an add of glitter because they wanted to add glitter to everything? I think I was the only person who would let them add glitter. And half the time I was like, I don’t know if this was therapeutic in the way that people expect OT to be, but I think it was therapeutic in the way that it was making a positive something in their life, even if this something was ‘I had 30 minutes of a good time with an adult I trust’, you know, or maybe sometimes it was more complex than that, like, I tried writing something, or I tried drawing something, or I succeeded at something, and I usually feel afraid to try things myself and so I ask an adult to do them for me if an adult is anywhere nearby but instead, I tried it and I succeeded, you know. And so, the tiny kind of incremental progress that doesn’t always document well unless you’re very good at documenting.
And so, that job ended very abruptly and very heartbreakingly because of COVID. I lost all of my jobs in March of 2020, including that one because no one was any longer allowed in or out of the facility at all in an attempt to try to protect the kids from COVID, which I did understand. And because my family was moving out of the state very soon, I brought literally all of the art supplies that I had compiled in all of my years of living in the same place and I donated them to the facility. I was like, let the kids put glitter on things. I can’t be there, but please, please let them put glitter on things. And I wrote them a list of all of the activities I could think of which was probably overwhelming. And then, I moved. And it was a weird year of 2020. But I moved to where I am now, eventually, which is on an Air Force base in England, and working in the elementary schools. And I moved here in January. So, I was coming in for the second school semester of the American school year. And I was replacing somebody who had just left. And so, I felt like I needed to pick up exactly where they left off, and do all of their goals exactly as they had written them, and do all of their treatment exactly as they had just been doing it. And I got probably three months into that, somewhere around March, then I had kind of a revelation sitting in a session with a kindergartener who had push-in services. And I was sitting beside his desk and trying to force him to write things the right way, quote unquote, ‘right way’. Write sentences, which was wild for a kindergartener, and I didn’t feel like it was appropriate. There was a lot of complicating things. I didn’t feel like I could understand him very well because we were all wearing masks. I didn’t feel like he could understand me very well. It was hard for me to tell whether his protests were like, I don’t know, you know, I don’t know what you want from me and that’s why I’m sitting here and not moving or, like, I just won’t, you know, and that’s why I’m sitting here and not moving. And I was telling myself in my mind, he won’t, he won’t, he won’t. And it’s like, I was sitting there, I was like, he can’t.
And I had already heard, you know, like, kids do well if they can from Ross Greene, and, you know, like, all of these things. But it was like a, for some reason, it just crashed into my mind sitting right there. Because I had already taken us back from writing to then trying prewriting lines and stuff like that. And I was like, just do it, just do it. You have to — I actually think I said to him quietly, because I was in this class with everyone. And I was like, “Buddy, we can’t just do nothing, we have to do something. We can’t just do nothing, I’m gonna have to leave in a few minutes. And we can’t just do nothing,” and spoiler alert, we just did nothing. He sat there; he did nothing. He quietly broke all my crayons, just like pushing them down on the paper, but not moving them at all until they broke and then he would pick up the next one and push it down and break it. And I walked out of there. We hadn’t done anything. And I was like, we haven’t done anything. And that wasn’t his fault. That was my fault. I’m the one who’s an adult with 50 things in their toolbox. I could have pivoted in any way. And I just froze in the moment just like he did. And the more I thought about it, it took several months and it took a lot of research. It probably took more than a year, honestly. But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I was compartmentalizing the stuff that I did at the previous setting in the States, in the group home, as like, oh, well, this is appropriate for these kids because these kids have been traumatized.
And, you know, trauma-informed care is like meeting them where they’re at. And all the roots of all the things that I loved when I was 13 and kids who have been, you know, through adoption and foster trauma and all of this stuff. And somehow, it clicked in my head that like, hey, the populace I’m working with right now, they move every two or three years. Their parents get deployed. They’ve been through COVID. They’ve been through a pandemic. And who knows how many countries depending on how often they’ve moved, they may or may not have had kindergarten, or first grade, or second grade, or third grade, or, you know, they may or may not have ever had someone teach them how to make a letter, or if they just had to pick it up themselves, or pick it up from Zoom. I was like, these kids are also traumatized. Like, everybody’s traumatized. And I’m adding to it by just sitting here being like, “Just hold this pencil in your hand and just draw this thing.” This is doing nothing to actually enhance their life and enhance their joy. Are they going to grow up and be 25 and be like, “Boy, I sure am glad that somebody made me draw a squiggle a bunch of times when I was a kid, because that’s how I attribute my success today.” And it was like, no, no one. If anything, they would be like, “Wow, I remember Miss Kelsie teaching me how to type because, you know, I do stuff on the computer all the time now,” or like I do whatever new social media is in 2040-something, and, “Oh, I remember learning how to type when I was a kid at school.”
And so, I just started thinking about what would actually be like if the child was the one in charge of their own care in the way that adults in skilled nursing facilities and adults at hand clinics, both of which were settings that I had worked at in the States, they are expected to be able to contribute to what their own goals for themselves are. And to, like, I would always say, well, a surgeon would do the same surgery regardless of who he was doing surgery on. But what makes OT special is that if you’re recovering from carpal tunnel and you knit, and if you’re recovering from carpal tunnel surgery and you go fishing, then your OT is gonna work with you on what the thing is that’s important to you. But for some reason, with children, just nine adults sit in a room and are like, well, they’re bad at handwriting, and everybody knows you need to be good at handwriting because you need to, because you need to for school, because school is important, and you need to handwrite, so you just need to learn handwriting. And it’s like, we just talked a big circle. And nobody thought about what the kid wants at all, or cares about. Like, the kid is like, actually, I don’t give a crap about my handwriting, they may or may not even see it as meaningful because their adults may or may not even be writing in front of them ever, actually ever, like I realized that I don’t write in front of my kids who are five and four almost ever because my calendar is digital, my grocery list is Alexa. I write all of the time. I write at work, I journal for fun, but I don’t pull up my journal and journal for fun in front of my five and four-year-old because they’ll just be climbing all over me. And none of that is relaxing to me. And so, it never even occurred to me that children may only see handwriting as a thing you have to do because you have to do it at school, because school says you have to because you have to. And nothing in that sentence was about occupational meaning.
And so, the more pieces of this that kept dawning on me, the more it snowballed, and the more I was like, I’m gonna take this all the way back to basics. And I’m sure that I had sessions that were not the most therapeutic thing ever in the world, because I was also figuring it out. And so, I was like, here’s a play invitation. Let’s see where it goes. And then, they were like, cars are my special interest, I will roll a car back and forth on the floor for 30 minutes. And I was like, okay, well, you probably do that at home. I don’t know that that accomplished anything, but maybe it accomplished building rapport, or maybe it accomplished feeling like, hey, a safe room exists in my school. Or maybe it accomplished feeling like, hey, an adult played in parallel next to me without feeling the need to grill me on things like what color the car was, or what shape its wheels were, or things like that. So, maybe I can trust adults one degree more than I did before. Or I don’t know, a lot of things. And then many of my sessions have taken me in leaps and bounds of watching the kids lead the play in ways that I could never have made up myself and don’t think could have been remotely as impactful if I had made them up myself. And so, it’s still a journey that I’m doing. This year, my focus of growth has been how to do it with big kids. Because little kids are easy. If one tube of paint is available in the room, then a five-year-old is gonna be like, “Oh, my gosh, let’s paint things,” but like, the middle schoolers are locked in and they’re like, “Yeah, all right, you’re another adult here to tell me what to do. What do you want me to do?” And so, my big focus this year has been how do I make it child-led, play-based for the big kids too. And it’s really fun to get to see them light up when that happens. That is some of the journey to where I have gotten to this point today.
Meg:
I loved, loved going on that journey with you. And I think all the OT’s listening, and I imagine even those in other fields, found so many points of that relatable, that we go in, something made us think, like, oh, my gosh, this job would feel so good to me. This aligns with my values and my strengths and I want to do it. And then, I think my first day I was trying to teach cursive as a school contractor, and I didn’t even know how to write the uppercase cursive letters anymore. And I was trying to look them up on my phone.
Kelsie:
Oh, my gosh.
Meg:
What was I doing? So, I think your journey is probably really relatable with that there’s so many moments for most of us where we go, this isn’t the impactful, like, deeply meaningful thing that I thought it was going to be when I went into school, or even it sounds like, for you, while you were in school. And I love listening to your story of how you kept, you were so determined, you continue to be so determined to find your way there. And I really want to defend your early practices that you’re like, “Oh, I was supposed to be doing evidence-based practice,” but that’s like the roots of OT, is that meaningful activity and occupation-centered practice is deeply impactful on our mental health and our well-being, and is how we learn. So, you sort of intuitively got there.
Kelsie:
I feel like all through school, I felt like, why aren’t all the professions OT? How does anybody grow up and want to be anything other than an OT? It’s just, it’s just like, why wouldn’t you want to make people have the power to do the things that they want to love in life? Isn’t that what everybody wants to do? And then it was like, hey, wait, why do we afford what they want in love in life to pediatric populations? Why is that only for the adults?
Meg:
Yeah. Yeah, and I think it takes so much creativity, I think that is a strength of yours. And it’s why so many of us are excited to learn from you. But it isn’t prescriptive. And for a lot of folks, that can be hard to access. But I was tracking your values. I don’t know you well. I knew your work. But I was tracking — I was tracking my values, I’ll be honest, through your description of the work that you did in talking about letting people come and go, that you were offering autonomy, you were offering choice, you were offering self-determination, you were offering safety in that for people’s nervous systems. And then, you know, we followed your journey into the schools. And I think a lot of us have been there, too. We’re like, okay, this feels easier. I’m not so confused about what to do. And also, it’s really uninspiring, and you really named it and it’s been said on the podcast before that handwriting really isn’t that much of a life skill anymore. I thought about it when you’re talking. I was like, oh, my gosh, do my kids see me write? They see me write, like, they have me write little ‘I love you’ notes that help with our goodbyes at school drop off. And when my son learned to write, that was all he wrote, was ‘I love you’. I love you to his sister, I love you to me. Like, that was all he wrote. And I didn’t realize until you said it, that’s all he sees me write. So, you’re bringing us around, like, okay, why are we doing this? We’re doing this because it’s what we do, because it’s what we’ve done. And then you named this pressure to make the kid meet the goal. That is where we, that’s how we get to behaviorism, right? Like, oh, my gosh, my job is to make the kid meet the developmental goal, often because it’s a milestone, or because it’s a school skill.
Kelsie:
Yeah.
Meg:
And I can’t make them so I have to threaten them or reward them.
Kelsie:
Bribe them, yeah, which is just a different kind of earning.
Meg:
It is. Like, if we don’t have any other way to critique the goal itself, or a different tool set of tools to help them meet it. And you landed back at self-determination and occupation-based practice. And that’s why it’s so fun to watch you work because you are working in this real context with the real demands. I want to talk about goals, Kelsie, because you came into a set of handwriting goals, it sounds like. How do you approach goals? What do you do with these kids who have goals that you don’t love but you have to see and document, and what goals are you writing?
Kelsie:
So, this is a very relevant question in my active current setting, because of the amount of turnover that there is in military families moving to new bases. So, every year, about a third of my clients or more move away. And then, a third or more come in with their IEP that was written in some other state by some other OT. And then, some of them, I’m the ones doing the evaluation over the course of the year. So, all that to say, maybe more so than a local district school that’s just in one place, there’s like an inherent amount of turnover that is built in. I am always going to be getting tons of kids with tons of other people’s goals on them. And maybe not the best practice to admit, but I feel like the very first step as I was getting to this place was that I would just be like, well, the goals don’t really matter. I just have to write like a stock cookie cutter OT-sounding goal. And then, you know, we’ll do what we do in treatment, and I’ll trust that at all like works out in the end, which wasn’t great. And isn’t where I’m at right now. But it was like my first thing, was like, listen, I don’t know how to say that playing for, you know, 30 minutes a week is going to help with writing a sentence by the end of the year but maybe it will. Like, I hope so. [Laughs]
And underlying that is the fact that kids are in special education because they’re not making progress at the expected rate. But they are still going to make some progress just by virtue of the fact that they are in the school and also that they are physically maturing. With handwriting, the fact that they are physically maturing is, like, I think a more significant part of it than we give credibility to because it is impossible to run a case study where you simultaneously look at the same kid with and without being forced to write stuff on a worksheet once a week, for 30 minutes, every week. There’s no way to compare themselves to themselves. And even the best actual study that you did comparing some kids to other kids wouldn’t still be comparing themselves to themselves. And so, a lot of times when I get five-year-olds and six-year-olds whose things are about exactly what they’ll write, or when, or how, then I know that their hands physically growing, their bones solidifying, and the muscles in their hands will mature over the course of one year, which is repeating one-fifth or one-sixty over of their entire life again, you know, so like, even if I did nothing, and no one did anything, then I feel like by the end of the year, they might be more ready to write than they are. And so, if I needed them to take a test to prove it or whatever, then I think there would be some amount of growth that had happened. And then, on top of that, I think that broadening what I knew I was doing, and studying the way that core strength and upper arm strength and all of the joints from proximal to distal, all of that strengthening, also supports the fine motor stuff. The gross motor supports the fine motor, the core strength supports the fine motor, the shoulder stability supports the fine motor. And so, from just like a biomechanical perspective, which is not where I do most of my thinking, but it’s sometimes where I do some of my writing and justifying, then, if I make a kid sit down at a desk and write a worksheet once a week, for 30 minutes, then they’re going to walk out of there. And they will have wrote one more worksheet in the week, once a week, for 30 minutes.
And if instead, we come up with games that strengthen their core, and strengthen their shoulders, and involve gripping stuff, and hanging on bar, and climbing monkey bars, and crawling so they’re stabilizing their shoulders and their trunk. And then, those games are fun and interesting. And then, when they’re at home with their brother or their sister, and they’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna make up this silly thing that I made up with Ms. Kelsie earlier,” or, “Oh, we hung on the monkey bars. Now I know I can do those, I’m gonna do those at the playground,” or, you know, “Oh, I learned how to put myself on the swing,” or all of those things, then I know that there will be actual carryover into the meaningful play of their life in a way that there isn’t — no one goes home and is like, “Mom, I would like you to print out more worksheets for me to do just like I did with Ms. Kelsie, because I just had so much fun writing worksheets with Ms. Kelsie.” The natural state of children is play if they’re not being imposed to do something else. And so, if I can come up with imaginative and wild things that will work themselves back out in their play because they can return to those same themes or that same interesting thing that they came up with, then I know it will be repeated in a way that the only other thing that I could do that would even remotely compare would be to assign homework. And that would not be, you know, that’d be the opposite of meaningful, and so I wouldn’t ever anyway. So, my options, if I want it to be repeated and carried out in their life, is to make it interesting enough for the child to revisit on their own terms.
So, when I get a student with handwriting goals, then I know the one thing, that they’ll mature; the second thing that the bigger broader stuff can be justified to the handwriting stuff; and then, third, I just really have like a real assortment of ways to both model writing in play and involve writing in play. And I’m always inviting the child to participate. But even if they won’t participate, then I’m modelling it. And so, I mean, I have markers, and paper, and whiteboards, and games on my iPad, and sensory bins that you can trace in, and just like a million things scattered throughout the room. I’m never more than like two feet away from some markers and paper. And anytime a kid tells me like anything that could be remotely construed as like, hey, I would like you to think about this or perceive this or remember this, I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m going to write that down. Because I’m not great at remembering stuff. So, I’m gonna write it down so I for sure don’t forget,” and then I’ll grab, and it might just be like, oh, you know, ‘Sofia loves Minecraft’, or it might be like, oh, ‘Oliver wants me to bring glue paper for next session’ because I ran out of blue paper and he was trying to make a fish and it didn’t work, you know. And I’ll just model, like, writing a checklist. And then, the next week, I’ll be like, “Hey, look, I’m checking this off, because I remembered to bring you the blue paper.” And I’ll just invite writing all of the time and show ways in which it’s used for meaningful things other than academic things. And so, if I get to the point where I feel like there’s specific needs for me to actually really suggest that we write something or if I need to do a little bit of testing or stuff like that, then the kids will often pick up on, and I’ll even explicitly say, like, “Hey, I need us to do this worksheet real quick so that I can see how things are going. And then we’ll, you know, we’ll play something else.” And by then, I usually have kind of the rapport and the trust that they’re like, yeah, okay, you’re not just — that’s fine, I can do that for you. Just like you do things for somebody that you care about. Like, yeah, I can do that for you. You know, you need me to do it, that’s fine.
Meg:
Yeah, the way you said it felt like y’all are on the same team, like you and the kid are on the same team. And they’ll do that for you. I love your justification for play-based — or not justification, you can use it as that, but also explanation for why it matters, of that when it’s fun and it’s meaningful, they’re likely to keep doing it. Because we all know, who cares what you do for 30 minutes, once a week? I love that tie in. And I also, I haven’t heard outside of the context of folks teaching on comprehensive literacy, emergent literacy, we don’t see a lot of emphasis on modelling for writing. I just would encourage people to go to your Facebook, The Occuplaytional Therapist, because you do a lot of fun projects around making writing relevant, and fun, and part of their daily life. And I’m just gonna say it here since we’re talking about handwriting, you alluded to this earlier, but I’m gonna say it here because we’re talking about handwriting a lot, is that, often, handwriting isn’t just not a life skill for folks, it’s inherently not strengths-based for a lot of Autistic folks who really struggle with motor coordination.
Kelsie:
Right, absolutely. Or pain. Like, physical actual pain, especially with the amount of connective tissue disorders being super big overlap with the Autistic population. And, you know, if a kid is like, “My hand hurts, my hand is tired,” but then their teachers most likely, it’d be like, we don’t have enough stamina, write some more, you know, like, you’re building it, and then they might grow up and be like, actually, I had laxity in my joints that was causing me pain always, you know?
Meg:
Oh, that’s a great point. Are you, for your goals now, are you writing typing goals? Are you writing handwriting goals? Like, what are you writing and what is your ideal that you wish you were writing?
Kelsie:
It really depends on the kid. But a lot of times, even honestly, like, in second grade, if I see that fine motor is really not going to be a strength for this human being who is going to need to write and type things in order to communicate and access the Internet and the world their whole life, then I will switch to at least including typing in like a parenthetical in their goal. So, my goal will, instead of being like ‘Sam will write three sentences with appropriate letter formation and sizing and spacing and line orientation’, then it would be like ‘In response to a prompt, Sam will produce three sentences written by hand or with access to a computer’ or sometimes I’ve been using the word ‘alternative pencil’, which I think I took from somebody who was on here, I’m pretty sure.
Meg:
Jane Farrall. Yeah.
Kelsie:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, I’ll give him parentheses that might, especially depending on the kid, I don’t do a stock goal for anybody. But like, I had one kid who I almost always wrote in all of her goals ‘with access to a conversation partner to clarify her thoughts’, because if she was trying to write out of her own mind, it was like, she would forget the end of one word, by the time she was on the second — whether typing or writing, one word would be, the key thoughts would just get all jumbled up. But if she could say to somebody, “I’m writing about my cat. My cat is brown, and my cat is named Fluffy,” you know. And then, they’d be like, okay, you want to write a sentence about your cat who’s brown and named Fluffy? And she’d be like, yes, and then she would write it and it would be great. And that was like, she just needed to have said it out loud. She was a gestalt language learner and used a lot of echolalia. And I honestly think that hearing the echo back of her own voice in her own head was what made the difference in what she could write. And so, just putting in her goal ‘with access to a conversation partner to clarify her thoughts’. I have a student who really loves predictive text. And we are working on, you know, when you’re texting someone on your phone, and it’ll do like three suggestions of what you might mean with either finishing your word for you or suggesting the next word. And this student will do really, really well as long as we can remember to just let it finish our words and not just start tapping to see what it’ll say, because they’ll get really interested in what the computer thinks about them. And then, they’ll be talking to it like they’re like, “No, I don’t do that. I don’t have a job,” because it started saying like, they’re going to work or something like that. And I’m like, it doesn’t know you don’t have a job! It’s just a computer. It’s just guessing. But we’re working on it as a tool that they can use. And on the times when they can stay on focus and they’re, they’re really regulated and they’re not scattered, and they’ve had a good day and all of that, then the predictive text is like incredible for them being able to write out their sentences that their thinking because they only have to type the first two or three letters instead of every single letter of long words. And then, they can search, you know, for which one it is. So, I’ll put things like that into the goal, that was the point of what I was saying. So, I’ll put, you know, ‘Sam will be able to produce three sentences about a preferred topic’ writing by hand, using the computer, using an alternative pencil, using a dictation partner to clarify their thoughts.
And I’ll put other things in there too. Like, with use of spellcheck, with use of grammar check, with use of a — I had a student who really loved just like a book of spelling reference, like a very small dictionary, basically, not a big overwhelming one. But, you know, ’50 Most Common Words’ or something like that, because remembering the spellings was really hard for them. And so, I’ll write those things into the goal. And the goal will instead be about thinking their thoughts, conveying their thoughts, and whatever the barriers are to being able to do that currently. I don’t see why physically holding a pencil and moving the pencil on the paper needs to be an added one of them if there’s already lots of them, like being able to access the right language to say their thoughts, being able to clarify their thoughts in a way that is accessible to somebody who doesn’t have all the context, or just like lots of other things that are considered more of like the literacy skills or maybe a little bit with the speech language skills. But I feel like I just don’t need to be adding mine to that when instead I could be just helping them with this life skill of being able to write down the thing that it is that I want to say, because if you think about the reasons why people are writing that aren’t just forced academics, there’s like physical need to write, like, I have to fill out a doctor’s form because I’m at the doctor and I have to. That’s the most barebones. Or I have to sign this paper so that I can buy a house or whatever.
Like, in life, why do you need to be able to write? One is for the sake of writing the thing that I’m writing. One is for love and joy and self-expression. And because I’m a human being and human beings create, and it’s delightful. And then, one is because brains remember things that we were writing down while we were learning them. And only the first one of those does it need to be handwritten. So, if a student is at the point where they can form letters that are readable enough, that, you know, a doctor whose handwriting is notoriously bad can read them on a form, you know, then voila, we’ve succeeded. And technically, you can do accommodations for that, too, because you can scan stuff with your phone and type it. So, none of the rest of it has to be handwriting for Autistic students, for other students who it just isn’t their strength, and it’s never going to be, and it’s not going to be a thing in their life. It can, you know, it can be broader than that.
Meg:
I love this place that you’ve arrived at because producing written text can be a meaningful occupation. Like, this is this is real. This isn’t just some sort of rote thing we do because we do. Like, you’re tying this in, how is this meaningful in people’s lives? And then, how can we approach it in a way that is strengths-based and meaningful to them? I want to hear what this looks like in practice for you. So, can you walk us through a composite case study or deidentified case study of how you might support a neurodivergent child in the school setting, let’s say one of those that comes to you from somewhere else with the letter formation goals?
Kelsie:
Yeah. So, it would depend a lot on their age. And I kind of touched on a lot of the types of things that I would do when I was talking more broadly about how many things it is that can be about handwriting or supporting handwriting. But if I needed to go really more structured, if the student was coming from a setting where they — I am thinking of a student who’s coming from a setting where they’re so used to adults telling them what to do, and that, in conjunction with their personality and age, just when I was like, “Here’s my gym, what do you want to do?” Then they were like, “I don’t know, what am I supposed to do?” Like, I don’t know, you know, what do you want from me? And then, I’m like, I want you to play with me. Here’s five things that are laid out, you know, do any of them catch your interest? And they’re like, “I don’t know, which one am I supposed to do?” And I’m like, whichever one you feel like! And so, I narrowed the amount of choices to just, like, do you feel like doing this, or do you feel like doing this? And then if they said, “Neither,” or, “I hate both of those,” then I would go with it. But they haven’t done that. They were usually like, oh, I would like to do this. And I’m like, great. And so, I usually offered one choice that was more structured and one choice that was very less structured, or one that was more tabletop and one that was more body movement. And the tabletop ones I do a lot with my iPad. I have just a number of different apps, and I have them in little boxes that are typing related, writing related, and then more open-ended like journaling or art or creativity. So, I’ve got this really cool one that I love working with Autistic kids because it’s called Writing wizard and I have the paid version. There is a free version. But in the free version, you can write letters of the ABCs, and you’d have a stylus. You literally are just tracing letters. It’s letter formation. It is the most strict handwriting OT that I get. And, you know, the letters have to be formed correctly, but the game is the one prompting you, not me. It shows you where to draw on the screen, and if you don’t make the stroke in that order, the game won’t work. It just goes like [beep] and it just doesn’t work. And so, that doesn’t feel like being corrected because an adult is not telling them like, “Make that ‘D’ the right way,” you know, it’s just like, oh, it’s not — and kids are used to games, like, if you do the wrong thing in a game, or choose the wrong thing, nd you got to do the right thing, like, that’s just how games are. And so, as you’re tracing, then it’s tracing it with really bright, fun emojis that are all moving, too. So, it’s super visual, spinny. Because it’s like, oh, I’m tracing this letter, and its rainbow pinwheels that are actively spinning around and making this cool little sparkly effect. And then, when you finish tracing the letter, then all the emojis that made it up fall to the bottom of the screen, or fly around like confetti, or like scatter. So, it’s like this tiny little, like, really exciting graphics moment. And so, then with the paid version, you can make your own lists.
And this is why I love this for my Autistic kids. Because I pull it up, and I’m like, whatever their special interest is, even if I already have one because I’ve got like 50 on Minecraft, but I do a new list every time anyway. And I’m like, “I need to make a list about Minecraft words. But I don’t play Minecraft. And I don’t know very much about it. Can you tell me all of the Minecraft words you can think of?” And then they light up and they’re like, “A pickaxe, and a sword, and a creeper,” and I have my little keyboard and I’m typing all the ones that they say. Or if they’re into it, I will just hand them the keyboard and they’ll just be typing on that, so then we’ve got typing in on it, too. And sometimes they’ll have a really obscure special interest. And then, they’re like telling me elevator parts. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, amazing. The confabulator, I don’t even know about that. And I don’t know how to spell that. And they’re like, I don’t either. And I’m like, I’m gonna try to sound it out. And then I’m modelling how you sound things out when you don’t know how to spell them. And then, once you’ve made the list, then you can — to me, from my adult lens, I don’t know how this doesn’t feel contrived — because then you just click on it, and you’re just writing the word, you’re just tracing a word, you’re literally just tracing a word. But never have I not had a kid just light all the way up and be like, “I’m gonna trace the word ‘creeper’,” and then write the word ‘creeper’. And then they’re like, “I’m gonna write the word ‘nether’,” and then they write, you know? They’re, like, so excited about them. Because they’re the ones who made the list. That’s on the one end of the scale, the most OT, the most letter formation. And then, when I write my notes, it’s like the easiest note in the world to write because I’m like, ‘Student worked on letter formation for 30 minutes’. So, they loved it the whole time.
So, anywhere in the sliding scale from that to, like, I’ve got other things that are slightly less letter formation. I’ve got an app that makes animatics, like real simple ones. And I show them one that I made that’s really, really basic so that it doesn’t feel threatening, but a lot of kids who hate writing love drawing. Just, like, really, a lot of kids. And so, I’ll be like, this has nothing to do with letters, you don’t have to write anything at all. But look, here’s my animatic of a ball bouncing. And I have a setting turned off. So, the way you make an animation is that you draw one thing, and then you draw it slightly moved and then you draw it slightly moved, and then you draw it slightly moved. And when you push play, it goes through them all at the frame rate, and then it looks like it’s moving. And this particular one doesn’t have a setting for just copy the last image. You always have to draw a new image. But it shows you a shadow of where the last one was on the screen. But so, even if you want to make a ball bouncing, you’re drawing a circle. And then, on the next one, you’re drawing another circle, and it’s slightly moved. And then, on the next one, you’re drawing another circle, and it’s slightly moved. And so, at the end of that you’ve at least practiced tracing, you know, 30 different circles in order to make anything happen. And most of the kids are doing more complicated things than just a circle. And they’re doing a very visual motor copying thing, because they’re looking at the shadow of how they drew it the last time, then they’re making a motor plan for how to copy that almost exactly with maybe a little bit of change, because you want it to be animated. And then, repeat that 30 times. And I’m like, that’s great. You’re strengthening all of those pathways. And it didn’t feel like it had anything to do with writing. So, these are some examples of things that I do with tech.
And then, I always have non-tech options. Another tabletop thing that I have is an old typewriter. And every kid in the world is drawn to an old typewriter that they’re actually allowed to type on. And you can’t really touch type super fluidly on an old typewriter, you have to hit the keys like, [tch] [tch] [tch] [tch], to even like make them tap and do ink. And so, my kids who only know how to index finger type don’t feel like they’re immediately failing at being able to speed type on it. Because the way that they type currently of like, where’s the T, there it is, where’s the H, there it is, is like the way that you need to do it in order to make anything show up. And so, it feels engaging and exciting. And then, you’re learning where the letters are on the on the keyboard. And then, if we’re going no tech and no tabletop, then I’ve got probably a sensory bin out of some kind that both has something in the base of it that can be traced in if possible, like sand or coffee beans or coffee grounds or, you know, let’s see what are some other ones that I’ve done, pasta or stuff like that. And so, then at some point in parallel play, I might be like, “I’m making an O,” or whatever the first letters of their name would be like, “I’m gonna make a K because it’s for Ms. Kelsie.” Check it out, you know, and see if they want to copy that. Or if it doesn’t have a tracing component to it, then it’s probably got some kind of a fine motor component to it. Like, what if we stick this in this slot, or we’ve got these wiffle balls and these feathers and pipe cleaners, and you can stick them through all the holes in all different ways, and then you can bend them and twist them and make all kinds of things. Or stuff you can build, I put out building materials a lot. I try to change my sensory bin every two weeks so that there’s just some new component in the room, but not so new that everybody has to do it for their whole session, like it’s still just an option. So, that would be one station in my room.
And then, I’ve always got big motor movement stuff. My favorite one right now is that I’ve got a giant keyboard mat on the ground that is a QWERTY keyboard made with masking tape on a gymnastics mat, and we’ll jump from letter to letter, or throw a beanbag at a letter, or try to hit a particular letter and jump around and spell things. And I feel like that is gross motor learning where the letters are on a keyboard because you can gross motor learn letter formation by making big letters in the air with your hands. And some of the kinder and first grade teachers will do that now because of the growing evidence that doing stuff gross motor first before fine motor gives you the chance to learn the pathways before the fine motor skills have caught up to it. But there’s nothing like that for typing, for keyboarding. It’s just like, listen, we know that the keyboard placement is super arbitrary and very frustrating, and good luck. That’s all there is to it. And so, instead, we’re jumping around it like physically like, okay, how do you get — oh, man, you’re gonna get from the A to the L? That’s going to be a huge jump, you’re gonna have to make a huge jump. And then, I’m hoping that that means that somewhere down the line, their brain remembers that one of those is one pinky, and one of those is all the way over on the other side of the keyboard. And yeah, all of the stuff that I mentioned before with crawling, and climbing, and going through tunnels, and all of the swinging, and all the stuff that that is core strengthening and upper extremity strengthening. So, that’s the way that I write those notes for that.
If a student chooses, a lot of times, it’s easy to catastrophize and be like, oh, my gosh, all they’re ever going to do is swing just every single time. Most of our students won’t choose that for more than like maybe two sessions in a row if they’re really feeling like, well, especially if they’re feeling really dysregulated from the school day. And then, sometimes, that means that I need to tweak when my session time is with them. Because I can just tell whoever on their caseload, like, “Hey, they need a lot of vestibular input at 12:15,” but that doesn’t need to be my skilled therapy session forever and ever always, but they do need a lot of vestibular input to self soothe at about 12:15 with a trusted adult. So, maybe we could get that on their caseload some other way, and I will see them at 12:45 or whatever it is, so that I can get a different side of them and be like, let’s meet this sensory need. And also, maybe let’s do something different with our time. But so, at first, especially, it was easy for me to catastrophize and be like, we’re not doing anything, we’re not doing anything, all I’m going to be able to say is that they did core strengthening if anybody looked at my note and they were like, “You just did core strengthening for 30 minutes straight. And then the next week, you also just did core strengthening for 30 minutes straight? Are you sure you’re doing anything?” But most of the time, the kids will be like, “I did that last week, I want to do something new,” you know, and then they’ll be interested in whatever it is that I’ve set out. So, I would say I usually have about four or five set out stations in my room. And then, I have other stuff on shelves and stuff that’s accessible. And so, some of the kids come in and just grab it all off and know what they want to do. Some of the kids gravitate toward the same thing over and over especially if it has to do with their special interest. Only a couple of times have I ever had to like put something fully away. And it was my first aid kit because I had a kid who just wanted to open all the band aids. And I was like, this is great and fine motor once, and then after that, I need to keep the band aids.
Meg:
Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for walking us through your therapy room. That was fun. I have one question that might be on the minds of our listeners to bring us back to something you said earlier. Kelsie, in your therapy room is there a bottle of loose glitter?
Kelsie:
There is. If there is, it is hidden. The big container of glitter is hidden. And I pour — this is actually going to another philosophy. I give the kids access to materials, only as much materials as I expect them to be able to use all of. There is never a time when I would step in and say — and I was tested on this just today — there’s never a time when I would step in and say, “Stop using that much glue. Stop using that much paints. Stop using that much glitter.” If I would, you know, be in a situation where I would think that, I just don’t put that much in the room. And sometimes that means I leave something in my car. Sometimes that means I leave something — I have an office in the clinic, but I do all my practice in the school. So, sometimes that means I just leave something in my office in the clinic. Sometimes it means I put it in my pocket. If I’m like adjusting on the fly and I’m like, oh, okay, you’re about to — I accidentally brought the whole bottle of tempera paint. So, we’re just going to go ahead and put that in my backpack and put that in the closet, like, surreptitiously while you’re actively doing stuff. I’ve had to adjust on the fly a couple of times but most of the time, so if there is glitter out, then I have one of my old saved glitter containers and I’ve put just like a centimeter of it or whatever in the base of it, and they can use all of it if they want to.
Meg:
I’m going to just call this episode ‘How to Use Glitter in Your Sessions’, if that’s your only takeaway on
Kelsie:
How to make the custodial staff be like, are you kidding me? And also, what is your job again, because what are you doing in here?
Meg:
Oh, it is, it’s so fun to like put our minds in your room. And I know we have a lot of school-based OT’s looking for ways to make it more fun, more meaningful. And we’re asking ourselves questions like, oh, man, this child is swinging the whole session, that means they need it, and this doesn’t feel right for my session, is such a practical solution that you gave to that scenario. So helpful. Before we wrap up, I just want to ask you, what are the big shifts you would like to see in school-based OT practice?
Kelsie:
I feel like it has to do with a shift that I would like to see society-wide, which is that, I mean, fundamentally, children are human beings is one way in which you could say it. Children are one of the last groups who it’s, like, societally acceptable, and more than that, societally expected, and more than that, you’re irresponsible as a parent or whatever if you respect a child as a whole entire human being, no, an autonomous human being, you start wading into territory where people will be like, “You’re a bad parent, you’re letting your kids run all over you, you’re letting your kids run the sessions,” or I see a lot, even on sites that I love and trust and follow and learn from, people will be like, child-led doesn’t mean letting them do whatever they want. And I’m like, I mean, not if they’re like harming themselves, but like, also sometimes, yeah. And why does letting them do whatever they want, inherently, make our minds go to the worst case scenario, like they want to run into traffic, they want to kick my tables over, and destroy my room, and break my iPad? They don’t actually want that. Like, they want to play and love you, and be loved by you, and be side by side with you, you know, and be connected.
You know, of course, there are cases where children are in extreme amounts of stress and hurting and afraid, and don’t know that there’s an adult that they can trust, and stuff like that. And so, I don’t mean that I never have any boundaries. I, actually, a lot of times with kids, there will come a point where they will almost be like, what will you actually let me do? How far can I go? And some of my kids, especially the ones who were just fine motor or whatever never get to that point, or if they’re older. But some of the younger ones, or some of the ones who are the ones who have like a behavior plan in place and stuff like that and the school feels like they’re, you know, they have an aide all the time, and they’re a kid who’s really, really struggling, I had a student who I’m thinking of who I’ve written about before on The Occuplaytional Therapist who was like, I’m gonna climb up this ladder, which was, it’s like a short ladder, like a three foot and it goes up one way and down the other. And so, they’re like, I’m gonna climb up this ladder, and I’m like, okay, because it’s a ladder, and it’s on a mat, and it’s part of the room. And they’re like, now, I’m gonna climb up the cabinets and jump from off of there. And first of all, they physically couldn’t. They were not capable of the gross motor things that it would take to get to the top of the cabinets. But I could tell they were just looking at me, like, if I’m allowed to climb some things, what are you going to stop me from? And I was like, I don’t know that that sounds like a good idea. Because I have gotten pretty good at using language that isn’t as direct and isn’t as threatening, and isn’t meant to convey the message ‘I’m the boss and you’re not’, or ‘I’m the one with power and you aren’t’. And so, I was like, I don’t think that looks like a good idea. And they were like, well, I’m gonna do it anyway. And I was like, I can’t let you climb up the cabinets. And they were like, I don’t even want to climb up the cabinets. And I was like, okay. And it was like saving face, you know? Yeah, I can’t do that. And they didn’t want to climb up the cabinets. They wanted to see if I would stop them. Like, is Ms. Kelsie actually going to stop me from hurting myself? Or like, am I really free to just go wild and, you know, burn the place down? And I think that that, or I like to think that that is like a little bit of feeling of security or looking for security, like, hey, in a way that I’m not anywhere else in school, I am free to decide what happens in this 30 minutes. But does that mean I can hurt myself? Is that dangerous? Do I need to be worried? And I was basically saying it’s not dangerous, you don’t need to be worried. We’re just playing. We’re playing and we’re together, you know. And they were like, yeah, all right, I can go with that.
And so, what I what I want to shift in school OT is what I want to shift in the world, which is that it is not a threat to let children be autonomous human beings. It is not giving up our power. It is stopping discriminating. We’re currently discriminating. And I have kids, my kids are five and four. I’m aware that this is like a day in, day out exercise and it’s like the definition of ‘Easy for you to say and hard to do’ in practice, in parenting, in all of it. It is really hard to figure out the right balance between I want to give you all the autonomy to live your life the way that you want to live it, and also, I do have to stop you from licking an outlet. You know, I read a thing that once said something along the lines of being a parent is like being an ambassador for an alien race who has no idea what is reasonable or expected. And you’re like, sorry, sir, you do actually have to wear pants when you go out of the house. And like, oh, yeah, okay, that is a first, we don’t traditionally use it to comb our hair. And like, you know, like, all of these things. And I feel like that’s why people slide real fast into ‘I need to protect my kid from the big things, so I’m going to nitpick all the little things, too’, you know?
And I do it. Absolutely. I’m speaking to myself. And so, that’s what I want, is just for us to be like, wait a minute, where’s the occupational meaning in this? Where’s the thing that we got into this for? What about this is their occupation? What about this is what meaningfully occupies their time? What about this is authentically delightful, and going to make their life better and more delightful? And I think that it is sometimes tempting to justify it in like a, well, if they could write really good, then they would be really good at school, and high school, and college, and then they would get a good job. And they would do their whole, you know, it’s like, easy to do that with like the boring kind of justification way. And I mean, no, like, what will actually make their life more delightful, tomorrow, in a year? Not some sort of like, I’m going to make them into a good adult someday, because there are going to be 50,000 other factors between now and then that interrupt it, or change it, or affect the trajectory in some way. So, what about right now?
Meg:
I love that you brought in the word ‘delight’.
Kelsie:
I probably took it from you. If I had to guess, is ‘authentic delight’, is that your phrase? Because I took it from someone.
Meg:
I say ‘authentic and joyful participation’.
Kelsie:
Okay.
Meg:
I think that’s yours, Kelsie.
Kelsie:
Somebody said ‘Enhancing Autistic joy’. And that is like a seed that I make a little bit bigger, because it’s not just Autistic joy, but everybody joy, and delight.
Meg:
Yeah, I love it. I love it. And one of the nice things is when we aren’t trying to wield so much power, we’re gonna feel better too, right. And it’s more effective. I mean, I think most of us who have tried being controlling and behavioral, which is most of us, with kids have seen them do it back to us. And then, when you try being generous with the child, I mean, I’ve said, “You know what?” I said, “This is too hard.” Right now I’m using Amanda Diekman’s language from Episode 60 where she talks about reducing demands, which ties in really nicely to what you were just talking about. I said, “This is too hard. Let me just jump in and help you. I feel generous. Let me help you. Let’s do it together,” and then, that child gives it back to you, “Oh, I could do it with you,” right. Like, they want to be generous back to you when you’re being kind and generous. And when you’re wielding power, they want to keep that power. So, I love the shift. It’s not just good for kids, it makes us feel better, too. Kelsie, it’s been so much fun talking with you today. Tell me what you’re working on now and where we can find you online.
Kelsie:
So, I have my Facebook pages where I post everything. And that’s The Occuplaytional Therapist. That’s with ‘play’ in the middle of it, The OccuPLAYtional Therapist. And then, my website, I tried to copy everything over to it. But I don’t get a hundred percent of things. But that’s ‘Occuplaytional’, just www.occuplaytional.com. And it’s a million times more searchable than Facebook is. I have it organized in a way that feels very intuitive to me. So, you can search by age, by at home or at school, by whether you want to read something about fine motor or sensory or self-regulation or social emotional, and stuff like that. And so, that is a lot more like ‘I have a question and I wonder if they’ve ever written about that’, then you can access that more easily. I have an Instagram that I don’t use enough. So, if you’re on Instagram, you’re missing out. But I’m trying really hard to expand when I post there too. And right now, I’m doing more work with webinars. So, I have, for the years that I’ve been running The Occuplaytional Therapist, it’s been putting everything out there for free for everyone. And now I am branching into what I can do to speak to people directly, but a lot of that content ends up back in some way shape or form with a link on my page. So, just keep an eye on the Facebook. That’s where to find most of what I’m doing.
Meg:
And I mentioned this in the intro as well. But you’re also working together with Rachel Dorsey who is updating her course, ‘Goal Writing for Autistic Students’, and is going to bring in even more of the OT perspective. So, for folks who just want more of Kelsie, their input is going to be woven throughout the strengths-based goal writing course.
Kelsie:
I’m so excited.
Meg:
I’m so excited. Y’all are like a powerhouse working together. That should be out towards the end of 2023 at learnplaythrive.com/goals. It’ll be similar to the old version in some ways, but also really, really updated and with some occupational therapy in there. So, excited about that, and we’ll keep everybody updated. Thank you so much, Kelsie.
Kelsie:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a delight.
[Ending music]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. Visit learnplaythrive.com/podcast for show notes, a transcript of the episode, and more. And if you learned something today, please share the episode with a friend or post it on your social media pages. Join me next time, where we will keep diving deep into autism.
