Why is the OPI Helpful to Me and My Child?

Imagine having a tool that helps you uncover your child’s challenges in the routine activities of daily life, AKA their executive functioning skills. The OPI is a great tool to help identify some of their deficits! Best of all, it won’t cost anything because it’s a free assessment checklist available online to download. The insight revealed in the OPI can assist in identifying the struggles that hold a child back with disorganization and other executive function issues, and I’m offering a handout to give you a starting point for developing your own individual plan for strengthening areas where they would benefit from help and intervention.

What the Organizational Problems Inventory IS and ISN’T

The OPI is a simple assessment to identify executive function deficits, but incredibly effective. It’s just three pages long, so it won’t waste your time. You can fill it out yourself if you know your child well, or you can partner up with your child’s teacher for a tag-team effort. There’s no age limit, so from third-graders to adults, everyone can benefit from it.

It’s super-quick to administer and even quicker to score, taking less than five minutes for each.

The OPI asks questions that can reveal your child’s struggles. Does your child have trouble sifting through information to find the most crucial details? 

Do they sometimes zone out during complex instructions? Forget how to do things? Or maybe they tend to skip steps in tasks? These are the challenges that can be identified with the OPI.

After you conquer the checklist, it categorizes the problems into six different categories: Sequential, prioritization, temporal, spatial, categorical, and attention. The categorization helps you understand exactly what kind of executive functioning challenges your child might be facing.

The Good, the Bad, and the Awesome

Now, let’s talk about what I love and what I’d love to see improved about the OPI.

The Organizational Problems Inventory is like your magnifying glass to find and understanding your child’s executive functioning difficulties. While it may not be perfect, it’s a free and quick tool that can provide valuable insights into your child’s abilities. So why not give it a shot?

Ready to embark on this executive functioning adventure? Make sure not to skip my Motor Monday video! I am sharing the link with you so you can get your hands on the OPI and help your kid improve his/her lifelong organization skills.

Thanks for joining me on this Motor Monday adventure! Don’t forget to share this with your OT (Occupational Therapy) friends and let’s help more kids with key organization skills that will follow them into adulthood.

Don’t forget your freebies and have an incredible day.