How Play Based Therapy Builds Motor Skills
What is a school holiday intensive program? It is a block of occupational therapy that runs from Monday to Friday throughout the school holidays.
Lots of families notice quicker progress with a school holiday intensive program, rather than weekly visits that are more spaced out. Here are the distinct differences in approaches.
A school holiday intensive program brings your child in for one occupational therapy session every day, Monday to Friday, rather than the usual fortnightly or monthly rhythm. Each day builds on the last, working toward one clear goal that you and your occupational therapist agree on before the block begins. It is not a general holiday activity program filling in time. It is targeted, OT led, and built around measurable progress on something specific, whether that is a motor skill, a sensory challenge or a behaviour the whole family is trying to shift.
Skill building relies on repetition, and a lot of that repetition gets lost when weeks pass between sessions. Your child practises something new, then has three or four weeks to forget it before the reminder comes around again, and progress can feel like it is constantly resetting.
A school holiday intensive program closes that gap. Five consecutive days of focused practice means a new skill gets reinforced again and again while it is still fresh, allowing for rapid skill development on a targeted goal rather than slow, stop-start progress. It is the same idea behind any intensive skill camp, whether that is sport, music or therapy. Concentrated practice, close together, tends to move faster than the same amount of practice spread thin across months, simply because the brain and body have less time to forget what was practised the session before.
An intensive works best when it is built around one clear, specific goal rather than a broad list. Some of the goals families choose to target during occupational therapy over the school holidays include:
Because the whole week is built around one goal, your therapist can plan a genuine progression across the five days, looking at what worked the day before and planning around that.
What a Week Actually Looks Like
Each day runs at the same time, Monday to Friday, so the sessions become part of the daily holiday routine. Your occupational therapist tracks progress across the week and adjusts each session based on how your child is going, something that is much harder to do when weeks separate each visit. By Friday, most families can already see a clear, tangible shift in the skill they came in wanting to work on, along with a plan for keeping that progress going once the term starts again.
If your child has an NDIS plan, an NDIS school holiday program can typically be included using existing occupational therapy funding, the same way weekly sessions are covered. Our team can check your plan and talk you through what that looks like before you commit to a block, so there are no surprises about cost either way.
Every intensive block at IMTT is planned and run by a qualified occupational therapist, built around your child rather than a generic template. Families across Wyong and the wider Central Coast choose this option when they want to see real movement on a specific goal before the next school term starts, not just a way to fill the holidays.
If progress on a particular skill has felt slower than you would like, the next school holidays are a genuine opportunity to change that pace. Places are limited, since every block is built around a small number of children and a specific goal, and the team likes to plan each week properly rather than squeeze in extra spots.
Get in touch with our Wyong based OT team to find out what an intensive block could look like for your child.
