What is Floortime and how does it help our children learn?
Floortime is an intervention that is used to promote a child’s development and learning through play. This intervention supports engagement, communication, positive behaviors, and thinking. Floortime is used around the world by teachers, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and parents. The two main emphases of Floortime are that you follow the child’s lead and that you join the child’s world by pulling them into a shared world to help the child master each of their Functional Emotional Developmental Capacities.
Functional Emotional Developmental Capacities are the fundamentals of emotional, social, language, and intellectual development. When we discuss them, we are talking about the fundamentals of relating, communicating, and thinking.
Through Floortime we want to help the child learn how to focus and attend, how to be purposeful, have a back and forth set of communications, how to problem solve, and to interact with their environment and the people in their environment. The goal for entering the child’s shared world is to help them become empathetic, creative, logical, reflective individuals.
How do you create interaction? We do not want the parent/therapist/teacher to just “do to the child.” By this we mean we want the child to initiate with US too. So, we challenge the child to do to us rather than the other way around. We can get the child started through tickles or swinging to start it off, but then we wait for a gesture or sound or point for the child to somehow show us what they want. We CHALLENGE the child to take initiative. If you are playing airplane with a child and stop, the child making a gesture or sound to indicate that they want the airplane to go again is them initiating that back-and-forth communication/ interaction that we want! Once we are getting that back and forth going, we are getting attention, engagement, and purposeful communication! The next goal would be to work on obtaining the continuous flow of communication. Children communicate often once they can be purposeful with gestures- smile, head nods, arm gestures, body posture, as well as eventually, words! But the hardest thing for children with developmental challenges is how to make that continuous flow. With that being said, the continuous flow is our MAJOR OBJECTIVE! Therefore child led play is such a huge component of our program!
The Floortime approach is based on the fact that emotion is critical to the growth of the mind and brain. By following a child’s lead, it means following their emotions. You find the interest of the child and you use that to draw them further up the developmental ladder. This means that you need to pay attention to the child and their individual differences. You need to look at the way each individual child processes sounds and sights and modulate sensations. Pay attention to their patterns and then tailor your interactions so that you can enter their world. This is the heart of Floortime.
