Our Occupational Therapist
Elmarie Kosterman started her career in 1987 and has been working as a therapist at Joe Simon Pre-Primary School since 2004.
Unlocking Your Child’s Potential
Does your child struggle with fine and gross motor skills? Is your child facing challenges with daily activities or sensory processing? Our occupational therapist, Elmarie Kosterman, can help! With over 3 decades of experience, Elmarie works closely with our teachers and parents to create a structured, goal-oriented program tailored to meet each child’s unique needs.
Improving Motor Skills, Perception, and Independence
Through occupational therapy, your child can improve gross motor skills, fine motor skills, visual-perceptual skills, and more. From crawling and walking to handwriting and reading, our program focuses on developing the skills that will help your child thrive. We also help children increase independence in daily activities like grooming, dressing, and feeding, as well as improve social and problem-solving skills.
Occupational Therapy focuses on the following areas:
- Improve gross motor skills (involves the large muscles of the body which is important for crawling, walking, jumping, throwing and catching etc.)
- Improves fine motor skills (smaller muscles of your hands and fingers which is important to be able to complete everyday tasks such as fastening clothing)
- Improves visual perceptual skills (interpret visual input and give meaning to it)
- Improves visual motor skills (tasks such as handwriting, playing and reading)
- Sensory processing (tolerate different types of clothing, better regulation & trying new food textures)
- Increase independence (daily activities such as grooming, dressing and feeding)
- Motor coordination
- Increase strength and stability (complete fine and visual motor activities with ease)
- Social and play skills (taking turns, sharing, understanding social cues)
- Problem solving skills
- Improving attention span
- How to manage your emotions
- Promote self-feeding
- Improve functioning skills (attention span, organising, sequencing, memory)
Our Speech Therapist
Tarryn Capes started working as a speech-language therapist in 2006 and has been working with Joe Simon Pre-Primary School’s learners since 2019.
Giving Your Child a Voice
Communication is key to success in life, and our speech therapist, Tarryn Capes, is here to help your child find their voice. With more than fifteen years of experience, Tarryn works with children who struggle with speech and language disorders, including articulation, fluency, and expressive and receptive disorders.
Unlocking Your Child’s Communication Potential
Our speech therapy program is designed to help your child improve self-esteem, fluency, and sound production, as well as develop conversational skills and exchange ideas. Through breathing exercises, visual and auditory aids, and speech repetition and imitation, your child will learn to communicate more clearly and effectively, and express their thoughts and feelings with confidence.
A big variety of disorders can be treated:
- Receptive disorders
- Fluency disorders
- Articulation disorders
- Expressive disorders
- Auditory perceptual disorders
- Difficulties with phonological awareness
Speech Therapy helps to improve:
- Self-esteem and independence
- Sound production
- Coordination of speech muscles through sound repetition and imitation
- Fluency
- Producing speech sounds more clearly
- Speaking fluently
- Clearly express feelings and thoughts
- Learning new vocabulary
- Communication (both verbally and nonverbally)
- Develop conversational skills
- Exchange ideas
