L₁E₁G₂A₁C₃Y₄

January 2023

While our Livingston location takes up a good portion of our website posts, we have an extraordinary team of people at our Long Branch, New Jersey location that need their fair share of lovin’ too. We will be featuring them much more often in 2023. There’s no better way to start than to talk about the “Leave Your Legacy” program that takes place in the OT department at our Long Branch facility. The “Leave Your Legacy” program was started by Illyce Kapel, one of our OT therapists, as a way to encourage her students to create something unique and fun for the clients to work on their therapy goals. These projects are specially designed with the Long Branch clients in mind based on their abilities, desires, and needs. These projects have no set requirements – they can be a game, a therapy task, anything creative or different that the clients can benefit from by incorporating their goals. Students have left behind all kinds of projects from workbooks, fine motor tasks, original games, to groups activities.

The most recent project was left behind by an OT student Katelyn Boyce as a gift to the program. She created an incredible life-size Scrabble board – with the letters – as a way for the clients to work on cognitive skills, sequencing, balance, and fine motor grasp. The Scrabble games were played in teams of two – one therapist and one client per team – with a total of four teams playing against each other. But as Nicole Flammia, the Director of Day Services said, “by the end of the game we had several onlookers participating as well!” Who can resist walking by a giant Scrabble board without getting involved?