The morning preschool class went on an outing to the lunar market to purchase Lunar New Year wall and door decorations. I tagged along and had a blast with them. It’s fun being a kid again =)
Jenna could not get enough of the animals at the lunar market:
After walking around, it was time for a snack! Fried pancakes filled with pumpkin puree. Delish!
Ethan ate spicy hot pepper seeds by themselves while he waited for the second order of pancakes!
Alas, in the afternoon, I returned to being an adult. I assisted Elaine with her cleft palate presentation. She did a terrific job. The visuals, the hands-on demonstration, and the interpretation by Grace, were very informative for the staff. After the training, Elaine worked with L-ST and taught her techniques to correct articulation errors.
After the training, Wendy (special educator) and I had a discussion and debriefed. Wendy felt all the goals she initially set for my visit, when we first met on January 10th, were achieved:
1. Angela to understand our environment, resources, strengths, weaknesses etcetera regarding speech and language needs and opportunities
2. Angela to discern needs of our identified children
3. to help Lillian to learn to discern the speech and language needs and opportunities
4. to help Lillian assess more effectively
5. to help Lillian to know what to do to help the specific identified children
6. to give Lillian ideas as to how she can help the various caretakers in preschool/ foster families/ healing home... encourage speech and language development
7. to encourage and enable other foster home staff (preschool teachers, therapists, foster families, Healing Home staff, Forever Home staff) to be more effective in helping encourage speech and language development
Wow... I did all the above?.. NO WAY..., but I did to a certain extent. When I was still in NY, I outlined a LONG list of goals to target. Some of those goals were met, but I was disappointed that more were not achieved. During my discussion with Wendy, I realized I had unrealistic expectations for my time because my goals could not be achieved in such a short time frame. However, by having the goals written down and given to , the groundwork is laid for future SLPs to continue the work. Instead of thinking about all that was not done, I rejoiced about all the things we had accomplished.
By the end of the discussion with Wendy, my throat was dry and my voice was hoarse, and I knew I was coming down with something. Uh-oh, not good at all! I still wanted to play with the kiddies in the playroom, but didn’t want to get them sick, so I wore a face mask. Upon entering the playroom, Vincent asked me, “你感冒了嗎？” (“Do you have a cold?”). I guess he encounters a lot of staff that wear face masks. Boy, those children are smart and their Chinese language vocabulary at times exceeds mine. I didn't even think that a 2 1/2 year old boy knew what "感冒" was.
My friend, Jeff L, met up with Elaine and I at New Day. He enjoyed playing with the children or should I say the children enjoyed playing with him...
And performing "手術" ("shou3shu4" (surgery) - another vocabulary word I learned from them!). We have doctors in the making:
In His Service,
Angela
20th, January 2011
