Week Two (16 April - 18 April 2013)
Tuesday (16 April 2013)
Once again, the Speech Language Pathology students found ourselves at Rainbow Crèche, although I think this time we were all a little bit more prepared. It had been decided that we would tackle Rainbow while the OTs would continue screening at Candy Floss as the OTs would be screening the children all at one time and it would be impractical for us speech students to interfere in any way, therefore putting a proverbial spanner in the works. We also couldn't abandon Rainbow completely as we had noticed that the children there were under-stimulated in terms of language and literacy.
We walked from Ridge Cafe to the crèche, the already boiling hot sun beating down on us at half past eight in the morning. We should have taken that as a sign of how hot the day was going to get. The children greeted us enthusiastically as they watched us walk down the steep embankment to the crèche, and I have to admit that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. We set up in their large hall thinking that we could take on all of the Grade Rs at once, seeing as there were four of us there and that we could each take turns to lead the different activities we had planned. The sheer volume of children that were running around in combination with the extreme heat could have erupted into sheer disaster, but I do think we managed to remain in control most of the time. Needless to say, we now understand why the group had been split in two the last time we went there. After witnessing how one of the children were prone to pushing and hitting, we came up with an impromptu social story on why we shouldn't hit - which many of the children added to with their own pearls of knowledge including "only granny can hit because she's old and doesn't know that it's not nice".
Seeing as the children were all so full of energy, we incorporated our aim of developing prepositions into an obstacle course which made them physically do an action which involved the preposition. Unfortunately, only one child could do the activity at a time and, as there were so many children, it became problematic as the ones who had already done the activity got bored really quickly. It was attempted to entertain them by singing songs and cheering on their friends, but that quickly wore off and we were back to trying to calm the chaos and help the others through the obstacle course as quickly as possible. I started to wish that I could split myself in two and that I had a Panado on hand. We did a few more activities, including reading a book which contained a bunch of verbs, before it was the children's lunch time and we had to get going.
On the walk back up to Ridge Cafe we came across a group of adults sitting in the shade of one of the buildings and I was, once again, confronted with the reality of the unemployment problem in the area. We joined the OTs at the cafe who told us that they had arranged a meeting with the ladies from the Marian Ridge Coordinating Committee (MCC) for that afternoon. As one of our projects is to set up a Library Literacy program, we went to the library to see what resources they have and to ask the librarians' for any advice they could give us. I think this allowed them to be part of the project at some level, and it was clear that they were excited about the program. We were able to meet the ladies who were extremely involved in their community and it was inspiring to hear what they had to say. Jenny, one of the ladies who head up the MCC, was interested to hear what was happening with the projects we were starting to set up. She also provided some valuable information about the community and what projects were already running which had been set up by community members and the various churches and organizations which are involved in the community. One that I found particularly interesting was the phoneme awareness program which is being done with the students at the Primary school. Two of the ladies who are part of the MCC were trained to do extra training on phoneme-grapheme awareness and have seen vast improvements in the students, in particular those who are first language isiZulu speaking.
Wednesday (17 April 2013)
The Grade Rs at Marian Ridge Primary kept us laughing the whole morning with the funny things they said, proving once again how blatantly honest children are. We started off the morning with an OT exercise involving a relay race, and while we had tried to insert our speech aims into the activity they failed miserably as the children were so preoccupied with doing the physical acts that they were not even bothering to do the speech part of it. It seems that integrating the activities needs more careful consideration when it comes to planning those activities, although the situation would have been impossible to predict. We had planned to target /b/ and /c/ in terms of phoneme-grapheme awareness and phoneme awareness within words, so we got the children to sit at their desks and introduced the /b/ sound first, asking them to think of words which start with it. We then got them to trace the letter, using the dotted lines as a guide. Each table had a speechie helping out and one of the OTs stayed in the classroom while the others went to try and sort out the jungle gym which had just arrived. I sat between two tables at the back of the classroom and almost immediately I noticed that one of the children who I was helping out had difficulty with the tracing due to fine motor control. Luckily, we still had an OT with us so I was able to speak to her about what I had noticed and she was able to work with him directly. Speaking to the teacher afterwards, we were informed that he, along with another boy at his table, had difficulties in class. This made me wonder why they were placed at the back of the class as it was clear that they would need as much support as possible. After tracing, the children were shown cards of pictures with the /b/ at the beginning of the word as well as random cards which had no /b/ in them at all and the children were asked to clap whenever they heard the /b/. While some of them clearly understood what was expected and heard the /b/, I got the impression that some of the children were copying their friends or clapping just for the sake of clapping. From there, we did the same activities with /c/. After tea-break, we went to screen some more Grade 1s. This time, I screened three kids of which two were predominantly isiZulu and could only understand the bare minimum in English. I asked one of them how old he was and he replied with the area he lives in, however when I asked again in isiZulu (although rather broken isiZulu) he was able to tell me without a problem. Screening in isiZulu was a challenge, however we were lucky to have a translated screener which helped a lot (even though I had to say a few words in my head a few times before I could say it aloud). One thing I have learned about working in isiZulu is that no amount of lectures will ever prepare you for a conversation with an isiZulu person.
The stroke group was rather interesting and the two ladies who attended were able to provide us with lots of information about what living with a stroke is actually like. We played a memory game which one of the ladies was brilliant with but the other one had difficulty remembering more than four items for a period of more than a few minutes. We also spoke to them about their feelings and attitudes towards themselves as a result of the stroke. It was actually heartbreaking to hear just how their disability had knocked their self-esteem. They both mentioned that they feel useless, and that they would both love to go back to work but feel that they can't. The lady who had difficulty with the memory task told us about the business she had started from home, selling loose cigarettes. It is a new business, but I think that it will give her a confidence boost. After the session, we met with Chantal and spoke about what we had learned. I must admit that I feel that I didn't pick up on half of what the others picked up on, so I guess that's something I will have to work on.
Thursday (18 April 2013)
Having been split up, two speechies and two OTs arrived (with a rather lost bus driver) at St. Mary's Hospital, the venue of Khetiwe. I didn't really know what to expect other than the lady who runs it is a physiotherapist and that we would be seeing clients with Cerebral Palsy (CP). We spent the day counseling parents and seeing what information and help we could provide where we could. It felt a bit like a whirl-wind and the three and a half hours we spent there were beyond my wildest dreams. To be perfectly honest, I always dreaded working with CP and I was nervous about what we were going to find, but I found myself enjoying it. I think I learned more about CP in terms of what to aim for and where the possibilities and limitations lie than I expected to learn from the day. I guess the challenge now is to develop what we can to leave at the venue for parents. One of the biggest barriers I faced today was, once again, the language barrier and I found myself being forced to resort to asking another mother to translate for me whenever I couldn't put the point across in my broken isiZulu. Just one more example to add to my growing list of why I should push myself to learn and practice my isiZulu. This Thursday entry seems rather small, however my mind is swimming with thoughts of how to deal with drooling, feeding problems, advocating for AAC devices, how to make a "switch", what pamphlets need to be developed and who we can wrangle to translate them into isiZulu for us, and what Mitochondrial Myopathy is.
~ Kirsty Wheeler
Want to find more about the Audiology side of Africa? Meet my mate, Katie, who will show you just that.
Once again, the Speech Language Pathology students found ourselves at Rainbow Crèche, although I think this time we were all a little bit more prepared. It had been decided that we would tackle Rainbow while the OTs would continue screening at Candy Floss as the OTs would be screening the children all at one time and it would be impractical for us speech students to interfere in any way, therefore putting a proverbial spanner in the works. We also couldn't abandon Rainbow completely as we had noticed that the children there were under-stimulated in terms of language and literacy.
We walked from Ridge Cafe to the crèche, the already boiling hot sun beating down on us at half past eight in the morning. We should have taken that as a sign of how hot the day was going to get. The children greeted us enthusiastically as they watched us walk down the steep embankment to the crèche, and I have to admit that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. We set up in their large hall thinking that we could take on all of the Grade Rs at once, seeing as there were four of us there and that we could each take turns to lead the different activities we had planned. The sheer volume of children that were running around in combination with the extreme heat could have erupted into sheer disaster, but I do think we managed to remain in control most of the time. Needless to say, we now understand why the group had been split in two the last time we went there. After witnessing how one of the children were prone to pushing and hitting, we came up with an impromptu social story on why we shouldn't hit - which many of the children added to with their own pearls of knowledge including "only granny can hit because she's old and doesn't know that it's not nice".
Seeing as the children were all so full of energy, we incorporated our aim of developing prepositions into an obstacle course which made them physically do an action which involved the preposition. Unfortunately, only one child could do the activity at a time and, as there were so many children, it became problematic as the ones who had already done the activity got bored really quickly. It was attempted to entertain them by singing songs and cheering on their friends, but that quickly wore off and we were back to trying to calm the chaos and help the others through the obstacle course as quickly as possible. I started to wish that I could split myself in two and that I had a Panado on hand. We did a few more activities, including reading a book which contained a bunch of verbs, before it was the children's lunch time and we had to get going.
On the walk back up to Ridge Cafe we came across a group of adults sitting in the shade of one of the buildings and I was, once again, confronted with the reality of the unemployment problem in the area. We joined the OTs at the cafe who told us that they had arranged a meeting with the ladies from the Marian Ridge Coordinating Committee (MCC) for that afternoon. As one of our projects is to set up a Library Literacy program, we went to the library to see what resources they have and to ask the librarians' for any advice they could give us. I think this allowed them to be part of the project at some level, and it was clear that they were excited about the program. We were able to meet the ladies who were extremely involved in their community and it was inspiring to hear what they had to say. Jenny, one of the ladies who head up the MCC, was interested to hear what was happening with the projects we were starting to set up. She also provided some valuable information about the community and what projects were already running which had been set up by community members and the various churches and organizations which are involved in the community. One that I found particularly interesting was the phoneme awareness program which is being done with the students at the Primary school. Two of the ladies who are part of the MCC were trained to do extra training on phoneme-grapheme awareness and have seen vast improvements in the students, in particular those who are first language isiZulu speaking.
Wednesday (17 April 2013)
The Grade Rs at Marian Ridge Primary kept us laughing the whole morning with the funny things they said, proving once again how blatantly honest children are. We started off the morning with an OT exercise involving a relay race, and while we had tried to insert our speech aims into the activity they failed miserably as the children were so preoccupied with doing the physical acts that they were not even bothering to do the speech part of it. It seems that integrating the activities needs more careful consideration when it comes to planning those activities, although the situation would have been impossible to predict. We had planned to target /b/ and /c/ in terms of phoneme-grapheme awareness and phoneme awareness within words, so we got the children to sit at their desks and introduced the /b/ sound first, asking them to think of words which start with it. We then got them to trace the letter, using the dotted lines as a guide. Each table had a speechie helping out and one of the OTs stayed in the classroom while the others went to try and sort out the jungle gym which had just arrived. I sat between two tables at the back of the classroom and almost immediately I noticed that one of the children who I was helping out had difficulty with the tracing due to fine motor control. Luckily, we still had an OT with us so I was able to speak to her about what I had noticed and she was able to work with him directly. Speaking to the teacher afterwards, we were informed that he, along with another boy at his table, had difficulties in class. This made me wonder why they were placed at the back of the class as it was clear that they would need as much support as possible. After tracing, the children were shown cards of pictures with the /b/ at the beginning of the word as well as random cards which had no /b/ in them at all and the children were asked to clap whenever they heard the /b/. While some of them clearly understood what was expected and heard the /b/, I got the impression that some of the children were copying their friends or clapping just for the sake of clapping. From there, we did the same activities with /c/. After tea-break, we went to screen some more Grade 1s. This time, I screened three kids of which two were predominantly isiZulu and could only understand the bare minimum in English. I asked one of them how old he was and he replied with the area he lives in, however when I asked again in isiZulu (although rather broken isiZulu) he was able to tell me without a problem. Screening in isiZulu was a challenge, however we were lucky to have a translated screener which helped a lot (even though I had to say a few words in my head a few times before I could say it aloud). One thing I have learned about working in isiZulu is that no amount of lectures will ever prepare you for a conversation with an isiZulu person.
The stroke group was rather interesting and the two ladies who attended were able to provide us with lots of information about what living with a stroke is actually like. We played a memory game which one of the ladies was brilliant with but the other one had difficulty remembering more than four items for a period of more than a few minutes. We also spoke to them about their feelings and attitudes towards themselves as a result of the stroke. It was actually heartbreaking to hear just how their disability had knocked their self-esteem. They both mentioned that they feel useless, and that they would both love to go back to work but feel that they can't. The lady who had difficulty with the memory task told us about the business she had started from home, selling loose cigarettes. It is a new business, but I think that it will give her a confidence boost. After the session, we met with Chantal and spoke about what we had learned. I must admit that I feel that I didn't pick up on half of what the others picked up on, so I guess that's something I will have to work on.
Thursday (18 April 2013)
Having been split up, two speechies and two OTs arrived (with a rather lost bus driver) at St. Mary's Hospital, the venue of Khetiwe. I didn't really know what to expect other than the lady who runs it is a physiotherapist and that we would be seeing clients with Cerebral Palsy (CP). We spent the day counseling parents and seeing what information and help we could provide where we could. It felt a bit like a whirl-wind and the three and a half hours we spent there were beyond my wildest dreams. To be perfectly honest, I always dreaded working with CP and I was nervous about what we were going to find, but I found myself enjoying it. I think I learned more about CP in terms of what to aim for and where the possibilities and limitations lie than I expected to learn from the day. I guess the challenge now is to develop what we can to leave at the venue for parents. One of the biggest barriers I faced today was, once again, the language barrier and I found myself being forced to resort to asking another mother to translate for me whenever I couldn't put the point across in my broken isiZulu. Just one more example to add to my growing list of why I should push myself to learn and practice my isiZulu. This Thursday entry seems rather small, however my mind is swimming with thoughts of how to deal with drooling, feeding problems, advocating for AAC devices, how to make a "switch", what pamphlets need to be developed and who we can wrangle to translate them into isiZulu for us, and what Mitochondrial Myopathy is.
~ Kirsty Wheeler
Want to find more about the Audiology side of Africa? Meet my mate, Katie, who will show you just that.
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