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2 July 2012

Going to hit one month here at the centre! After the weekend, my emotions have calmed down :D Thank you to my friends who were there to comfort me. I was assigned to video some clips from the session today and I was pretty happy about it. I felt like I could learn more than sitting in the resource room cataloging toys. 

When I walked in the room, I noticed someone new was in there as well. I first thought that she's a new staff because I heard that there were a couple of people who came for interview last week. But after we introduced ourselves, I found out that she's another intern! She's studying Psych at UK and is currently on summer break. 

The session that I sat in was an occupational therapy session. During the session, the therapist did some exercise to help strengthen the kid's arm strength. The therapist had the kid's legs placed on a seat and his hands/palms were on the ground to support his body. It was as if the kid was playing the wheelbarrow game. Hands down, legs up. Yea. And the therapist placed a wooden board and shape-blocks in front of the child. The child was required to place those blocks onto the board according to the shapes by using one hand, while the other hand was used to support his body. I think the child performed pretty well. 

The occupational therapist then continued with the next activity. The child was required to knock the wooden balls, like how you play whack-a-mole, but the wooden balls don't pop out randomly. They're placed there on top of the holes and the child will have to knock them until the balls fell into the hole. In order to help out the child, the therapist put on a wristband on the child's wrists to increase the child's wrist strength when whacking the wooden balls. The therapist would also say specifically which wooden ball that he wanted to child to knock by saying the colour of the ball. Since occupational therapy could be rather boring, the child will get to have a 5-minute break time after he completed a certain amount of activities. The therapist would also sing songs with the child to reduce his boredom and practise his speech. 

After this session ended, the child continued with another session. This session focused more on the academic aspect where the child was taught about mathematics, such as addition, counting, comparing which side has more (or less) items, and so on. The therapist that was meant to conduct this wasn't around so a teacher took over. During this session I also met someone new. She's a new staff here. I was yet to confirm but I was rather sure that she will be working here because she got to conduct a session with the teacher telling her what to do (since she's new here and the therapy sessions/techiniques may be different from her previous workplace). I really enjoyed watching her conducting the session because she has so much positive energy when she's conducting the session. It seemed as if everything comes naturally! 

I was hoping to be there throughout the entire session but I couldn't. The camera that I was provided ran out of memory and I needed to transfer the videos to the computer before I could continue with the recording. It was kind of frustrating that there were so many old files in the memory card and no one seemed to be bothered of deleting them. Anyways I went upstairs to ask where do I placed all the clips that I'd already saved in the pendrive. The staffs I asked didn't seem to know anything and one of them had to call the administrator to ask about it. I wonder why they didn't know how I should deal with those video clips -.-' It still got sorted out later so it was okay. 

During lunch hour, I was confirmed that she'll be a potential staff here in the centre. She'll have two weeks to show the boss her capability and then the boss will decide if she wanted to hire this new young lady. 

As for the afternoon I didn't do anything productive but only type in the data of the children into the template. But I'm still stoked about meeting two new people today :D