Overview of Floortime Floortime is a treatment approach that can begin with children as young as 6-months of age. It is often used with individuals with special needs and social-emotional-regulatory disorders and well supported by research. Our lead Floortime therapist, LaNae Moline, is the only DIR Certificate Level III candidate  in Maine. Floortime’s major features include building functional communication at different developmental levels. It is relationship based and allows for individual differences. The six levels are: 1. Self-regulation and interest in the world: the dual ability to take an interest in the sights, sounds, and sensations of the world and to calm oneself down.  Children try to process what they see, hear, and feel, and instinctively turn toward a pleasing face or a soothing voice. They learn to enjoy, understand, and use those pleasant sensations to calm themselves. This ability to self-regulate enables us to take in and respond to the world around us. 2. The ability to engage in relationships with other people.  In our earliest experiences with our parents we learn to fall in love. We recognize our parents as something nurturing and joyful, we reach out for them, and we trust them. This ability to be intimate allows us to form warm and trusting relationships with people that grow throughout our lives.   3. Two-way communication.  Mommy smiles at me, I smile back. Daddy rolls me the ball, I eagerly roll it back. These early efforts at two-way communication teach us about our own intentions, provide our first sense of causality, of making things happen, and begin to establish our sense of self. As these early interactions become more complex, we learn to communicate with our gestures and understand the intentions and communications of others. We build the foundation for participating in much more sophisticated conversation later on. 4. Complex communication: the ability to create complex gestures and to string together a series of actions into an elaborate and deliberate problem-solving sequence.  The toddler runs to greet Daddy at the door, holds up her arms for a hug, then teasingly runs away, saying through her behavior, “Daddy, I’m glad you’re home.  Hug me, now chase me!” 5. Emotional ideas: the ability to create ideas.  Simple play, such as stacking blocks, transforms into complex fantasy play—the blocks become a fort where good guys and bad guys engage in battle. The child uses these scenes to experiment with the wide range of feelings and ideas he discovers as his world grows bigger. He also uses words to indicate wishes and interests:  “I want juice!” 6. Emotional thinking: the ability to build bridges between ideas to make them reality-based and logical.  The child begins to express her ideas in play and in words, to describe her feelings instead of acting them out, and to string ideas together into logical, original thoughts:  “I am mad because you took my toy!” For each of the six levels we can look at the particular motor skills, language skills, and visual/spatial processing skills that relate to that level and are needed to support that level. This gives us a much more integrated picture of your child's development. We use this critical information to tailor an intervention program to help your child begin climbing the developmental ladder to success. Floortime is easily blended with other treatment approaches, such as ABA, and can be implemented at home, in school or at our center. Floortime is most effective in generalizing new skills into real life situations. This eliminates the need for a child to depend on a prompts or questions from an adult to initiate and interact. This helps your chlid act independently in school, social situations and in making friends. For additional information, contact us.