The hospital has two SE therapists, one of them a Montessori therapist. They work on the development of the children's senso-motorics, individually or in a group, using special means like game therapy and the special methodology of Montessori therapy with its specific tools.
The SE therapists, on their own or together with the rehabilitation specialist, develop the child's knowledge of his/her own body scheme and his/her orientation in the environment. They also develop the child's concentration, attention, constructive thinking (in terms of size, form, heaviness and colour of the objects around hem), memory and other psychological functions, in close collaboration with the psychologist and the doctor who treats the child.
Parents get instructed on how to treat the child at home and their tasks are clarified.
The impairment of the High Cortical (Brain) Functions of children with cerebral damage is the reason to have difficulties in acquiring cognitive and graphic skills. The problems of their intellectual development are due to the impairment of space knowledge and practice, of the memory and speech structures.
The activities of the SE therapist are complex and aim at:
The preparation of the children with special needs for school starts at the age of 5-6. The education work is done individually, using two methods: verbal and non-verbal, depending on the child's abilities to express himself. For their introduction into letter and number symbolics special methods are used to develop further the child's ability to think and memorize. The formation of the syllable, word or sentence is taught to the child using technical means and visual material.
All the basic notions, characterizing qualities of objects or their quantity, are included in the children' training.
By individual programme the child is taught to count objects, gets introduced to the graphic symbols of numbers and the arithmetic operations.
The SE therapist helps the children during their secondary and high school.
The specialist works on the patients' techniques of writing and reading, helps them to analyze the ideas of what has been read, to build skills to retell in his/ her own words.
The programme for graphic skills is part of the programme for school maturity. All the graphic exercises aim at the children's orientation in space; they develop their observation skills, steadiness of attention, imagination; they train the hand movements and are taught to use the right grip at the objects. Written speech is the final stage of improvement of the fine motorics. The child is taught to write by the copying method, using a model; in regard to his/her individual abilities he/she can write dictations or do independent creative writing.
The target of the SE training of the child with special needs is that he/she would receive the best training for his/her starting school age and for his/her further development.