Therapies

The Programs

ALMA provides specialized educational and therapeutic programs for children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD), which include Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Special Educational Support, and Psychomotor Education.

Speech Therapy

Speech Therapy is the science concerned with the treatment of speech and language disorders. Speech and language disorders refer to difficulties in understanding, expressing, and using language (both spoken and written). These difficulties may also concern the quality of speech, such as incorrect articulation, phonological disorders, fluency disorders, and others.

Language develops very early through hearing and comprehension. Therefore, it is crucial that linguistic stimuli are diverse from the moment of the child’s birth—initially within the family environment and later at school. Speech delay, meaning when a child is late to start talking or when language development does not correspond to their chronological age, is an early indicator that the child requires a speech and language evaluation.

The goal of speech therapy is to improve the child’s communication skills, developing non-verbal communication first and then spoken language. It also aims to improve speech disorders, as well as language comprehension and expression. An important factor in language development at ALMA is to create the appropriate conditions for the child to enjoy communication. In practice, the speech therapy program may take the form of play-based activities, such as speech card games, where the child develops descriptive language in an interactive and enjoyable way.

Occupational Therapy

Occupational Therapy is a health science that focuses on the organization of movement and aims to achieve maximum functionality in daily life. It is an intervention that helps children develop practical skills and abilities necessary for everyday living. Activities of Daily Living (ADL) include areas of self-care, such as dressing and undressing, toileting, personal hygiene, feeding, sleeping, and household tasks, among others.

Occupational therapy emphasizes organization of thought, attention, coordination of fine and gross motor skills, graphomotor skills, visual perception, development of cognitive abilities, and sensory regulation. An integral part of the intervention—and the primary means through which progress occurs—is play.

Within occupational therapy sessions, children are also given the opportunity to experience different stimuli (visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, olfactory) which, due to their potential difficulties in various areas (movement, cognition, behavior, comprehension, or limited interaction with the environment), they may not have previously encountered. Through this process, they gradually develop greater tolerance and familiarity with these stimuli, progressing toward Sensory Integration.

Special Educational / Learning Support

This program focuses on adapting teaching methods regardless of the subject matter to the skills that facilitate the child’s learning. Essentially, the therapist adapts instruction to the child’s learning style, often combining more than one teaching method and repeating the process as many times as necessary until the child masters the desired skill.

The intervention program aims to develop basic cognitive skills, such as understanding instructions, developing imitation abilities, object recognition, improving attention and perception, developing pre-academic skills, and enhancing the child’s social abilities. For school-aged children, the special learning programs aim to teach written language skills (reading, spelling, vocabulary, syntax, etc.) and mathematical concepts (quantitative understanding, arithmetic operations, problem-solving, etc.) which the student may not have adequately acquired during regular classroom instruction due to various difficulties (specific learning disorders, general learning difficulties, attention deficit disorder, organizational challenges, etc.).

Depending on each child’s or adolescent’s learning level, special education teachers design an individualized learning program to help them achieve their educational milestones, while encouraging and rewarding every effort they make.

Psychomotor Education

Psychomotor education is an intervention that uses movement as its main medium, aiming at the development of perception, body awareness and the acquisition of social skills.

Through the intervention, improvement of physical condition is achieved, development of the individual’s motor and sensory functions, improvement of memory, concentration-attention, socialization, self-confidence, emotional maturity, ultimately resulting in a better quality of life.

As with all programs, progress is recorded systematically so that all therapists working with the child have access to it.

Interested in the program?

If you are interested, you can contact us by phone at +30 2109828150, or send an email, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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