Recovery= Learn by doing!

Chloe is recovering from a floppy infant condition which is caused by an unknown neurological disorder. Her recovery is a combination of proper medical intervention and physical exercise, which keeps the gross motor and fine motor skills developing. She is still working on her left shoulder to use the proper muscles that should be used. Her right ear has tinnitus and she will probably need to wear an ear plug in it most of the time. If that ear is exposed to loud noise the tinnitus could become louder in the ear for a period of time.

Chloe will keep trying to get the left shoulder to work properly through exercises with the personal adaptive trainer twice weekly and her individual workouts. Her music therapy where she practices piano, alto and soprano recorder also helps her to work on better control of both arms. Her typing is around 25 words per minute which is improving control of fingers, hands and arm. Chloe has good vision according to her eye check up annually but her doctor suggested glare-resistant glasses and we found she is able to do reading and other fine motor activities better with these glasses on.

Chloe language development had gaps or missing areas. She knew her nouns but adverbs and verbs seem to be missing at first. Speech therapists identified the areas and gave us homework. Rosetta Stone Spanish CD helped her straight out her English by learning Spanish words to everyday items and actions through these fun activities. Her reading skills help demonstrate the different parts of sentence structure, her typing program also demonstrated proper sentence structure. Chloe learned how to spell from these exercises. Concepts (more/less, on time/late, and others) are worked on in music therapy and in community activities we do.

With shoulders and arms not working together the eyes and the hands not working together seemed to be a logical issue. Music therapy works on note recognition and playing music works on eye- hand coordination issues. Noise in one ear is a distraction too. So Chloe wears an ear plug in her right ear and tries to rely on what she hears coming in from the left. This is the last stage, for years she wore ear plugs in both ears till she was ready to try going it with one ear plug.

Chloe will begin volunteering at a Thrift store in March. The activities she will do is folding, hanging clothes and washing dishes are good non-weighted activities to keep the arms working together. These are similar activities her orthopedic doctor suggested she works on. It will also be a work atmosphere so working on work concepts and work discussions will be other objectives.


February 10, 2011
This is our progress to this point! Jacquie Skubal and Chloe Anderson