{"id":1804,"date":"2010-08-05T19:44:58","date_gmt":"2010-08-05T19:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/?p=1804"},"modified":"2010-08-05T19:44:58","modified_gmt":"2010-08-05T19:44:58","slug":"the-beginning-of-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/?p=1804","title":{"rendered":"The beginning of South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IntroducingHere we are in South Africa,\u00a0 waking up to a view of the Drakensburg mountains.<\/p>\n

5.30 AM and the alarm goes off, and bleary eyed we wake up and have a very quick breakfast, pack our lunches for the day and go for a meeting with the teachers at Letaba special needs school where we will be working for this trip.\u00a0 It was a short 10 minute drive from where we are staying and Chris, our driver got us there for 7.10am which we had been asked to arrive for this time.<\/p>\n

We met the teachers in what they call their morning assembly which is just for them.\u00a0 On arrival to the school we are greeted with a lot of bright excitable smiles from a big group of children before we spoke to the teachers.\"Greetings!\"<\/p>\n

The teachers start their own assembly with a prayer and a song which was a hymn.\u00a0 (Something you would never see in a staff room in the UK!) The meeting was great and we spoke about the children that the teachers would like us to work with and who would benefit from the work we would be doing with them, which had been explained to them in a previous meeting when we were having discussions with the school. Since visiting the school in March they have started a great process to investigate and try to improve why there are no therapists in the schools for children with disabiliities.\u00a0 They thought that our project would fit in nicely to what they were trying to acheive.<\/p>\n

\"JudyThe teachers that we spoke to as a group had given us 25 children for us to work with us, who had been selected as those who may be able to best benefit our work.\u00a0 We discussed with Susan, one of the teachers who would be helping to coordinate this project while we were here, how we could recognise all of the children, so we had a meeting and were introduced into the room that we would be working in while we waited for her.\u00a0 She began to write down all of their ages and disabilities and names for us so we were able to have more of an idea of the needs of the children.<\/p>\n

In an earlier meeting the staff had let us know that we could start whenever we were free. Luckily we had brought with us some art and craft materials, as while we thought we were waiting for Susan to arrive back to the room, we were greeted with 25 excitable and curious children of a wide range of disabilities, looking forward to having some time with us to work on activities.\u00a0 We decided that this day would be better spent using activities to introduce ourselves to one another so that we were able to bond better with the children before we started the further activities with them.\u00a0 This would help us build up a good understanding of their needs so we would be able to work well with them in their groups.\"Planning<\/p>\n

The activities started with a ‘Hello’ song to introduce everybody to each other.\u00a0 Everyone went around singing and telling us their names, and those who could not talk were helped out by their freinds who would sing their name for them.\u00a0 They would then communicate with us through smiles and laughter.\u00a0 We then introduced a game using a ball which was passed around the circle giving us a chance to remember names of everyone we passed the ball to.\u00a0 The ball was thrown to different children, and we tried to help those who we thought would struggle,including a young boy who did not have any arms.\u00a0 He laughed at us and shook his head as he balanced the ball with his chin and picked it up and kicked it with his legs! This showed us that most of these children were very independant and capable, and it was us that were more worried about them and their abilities affecting the activities.<\/p>\n

We then played a game of duck duck goose and whizzed around the circle with the children in the wheelchairs, being chased by the more able bodied children.<\/p>\n

Through all of these activities, we were able to build more of a relationship with the children to familiarize ourselves with the level of support that each individual child would need.<\/p>\n

We then went to plan activities and were split into 2 groups, one of us planning sensory activities and the other planing the arts and crafts which would then be used on the different disabilities of the children.<\/p>\n

We then looked forward to the next day where we would be able to put these activities in place with the children.<\/p>\n

\"Our<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our first day of working with the children at Letaba special needs school to begin our important work<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1804"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1818,"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions\/1818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yeboyes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}