We had a busy morning at Rainbow Creche this week! It is a great feeling to arrive and see the kids faces light up when they see our team. We arrived earlier this week, which meant that the children were all eating their breakfast. It was interesting to note that they were all given porridge before they started their day, and I can only imagine that in an impoverished community, ensuring that the kids tummy's are full can make such a difference in how they perform during the day.
Our team, made up of audiology, speech therapy and occupational therapy students spent our extra time discussing how we can each achieve and incorporate our aims into the activities that had been planned for the day. We are slowly learning how to incorporate the aims from each discipline into each activity, however it is proving to be a bit tricky! I feel that we are improving as we get to know the other people in our team better- moving from being 3 separate teams of OT, Speech and Audio towards one big team. It is also becoming easier to share ideas between the disciplines as we leave room for input, correction and ideas from others!
I am learning a lot about occupational therapy and the kind of activities that they use to help children develop fine and gross motor skills. I'm also learning valuable skills from the OT's such as how to use the resources around me to create activities. The creche has a room full of equipment such as hoola hoops, blocks and rope, which the OT's have been using for different games and activities- hoola hoops for spatial relations (Getting the children to stand inside the hoola hoop, infront of, behind...) and blocks and rope for balancing activities. They also recycled cardboard from cereal boxes to create a 'threading through cardboard' activity for fine motor skills.
Working with so many children brings a lot of challenges. While most of the children are engaged and participating in the games and activities, there are always 2 or 3 who aren't. Some of the children don't speak English, so if we forget to repeat the instructions in Zulu they don't understand what is required of them. There are also a few that seem to be way behind their peers in different areas of development, every now and again we notice that we have forgotten about them in the group and they haven't even started the activity. Then there are the children who have a LOT of energy- if we take our eyes off them for 1 minute they end up at the other end of the room throwing their shoes at the other kids ( Okay, that exact scene hasn't happened yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did!). But we are beginning to find our way around these issues, and hopefully within a few weeks we will know exactly what each of these kids needs to keep them engaged. This week I learned that choosing one of the children who tend to get distracted, and sticking with them for the whole activity makes a tremendous difference, instead of bouncing between kids as they stop participating. We have a large team, so if we are each able to give our attention to one kid the activities might go even smoother.
This week I am working on letters to send home after screening to the parents/caregivers of children with impacted wax. It has been brought to our attention that the local clinic does not do syringing anymore, so the likelihood of parents/caregivers taking their child to the closest referral hospital for wax management is quite small (For most caregivers it means missing a day of work & school, paying taxi fare for 2 people and waiting hours for their appointment). I hope to be able to explain what impacted wax is, as well as explain treatments that are more relevant (an likely!) for their situation- such as using wax drops or olive oil to soften the cerumen.
I am learning a lot about considering the circumstances of the people in the communities that I am working in before making the typical referrals...and I think that is one of the big lessons we are meant to learn while doing this prac...being relevant, applying what we know to each individuals situation and meeting people where they are at...
No comments:
Post a Comment