#OralSensoryProcessing #OralProcessing #OccupationalTherapy
What is Oral Sensory Processing?
Oral Sensory Processing is the way how our brain receives input from our mouth and jaw. When we eat and drink, our mouth sends information to our brain regarding what we are eating or drinking. This information includes texture, temperature, and taste.
Our brain also receives proprioceptive information from the joints of the jaw as we bite and chew foods with different types of resistance, such as crunchy or chewy pieces of food.
Oral sensory processing also takes care of the way how we move our jaw, control of saliva and produce sound for clear speech.
Problems with oral sensory processing
Children with oral sensory processing may have heightened sensitivity to oral input or experience decreased awareness of oral input.
Children with hypersensitivity may:
- Gag or choke
- be known as “picky eaters”
- extremely limited diet
- refuse to use utensils
- difficulty with the maintenance of dental hygiene
Children with hyposensitivity may:
- bite, chew on, or mouth non-food objects
- try to bite others
- over-stuff their mouth while mealtime
- Oral sensory processing difficulties are related to how the mouth is organized and prepared to receive the food and provide appropriate input to the brain.
Biting, chewing, chomping, crunching, sucking, licking and swallowing are some of the pre-linguistic activities that are fundamental in our speech abilities. Many often children with speech and language difficulties have difficulties in oral sensory processing.
To maintain healthy oral sensory processing we must allow our children to explore different textures and help them to identify what satisfies oral input. In order to improve the speech and oral skills, I prepared useful exercises to work on chewing, blowing and sucking.
This exercises will help your child to improve:
- strength in the mouth
- bring awareness
- improve the vocalization of sounds like P, M, B.
- bring you new ideas
- help you to observe your child
- help you identify possible speech difficulty
Click in the link below: https://lisa-shchyhel.com/oral-sensory-processing-exercises