This week has been a relatively quiet but busy week. I can’t believe that I have been at PAMIS for three weeks now! 

The office has been very quiet this week as it is the first week of the school holidays. As it is the school holiday I had no meetings this week but lots to do in the office. When we were at the high school last week we told them that we would have the multi-sensory story finished for the schools going back as this is when the transition starts. This means that we had this week and next week to write and create the story. This week Max and I wrote the story as well as a small “song” to be sung to K at the start and end of the song. This was one of the suggestions from the primary school. As K loves songs and listening to music we thought this would be a great way to grab her attention. She also loves shaking a maraca or bells along to music so we thought she could do this along with the song. Creating her story was relatively simple as we were just writing what she would be doing on the day that she goes to the high school. We decided to include something that would happen in the morning at her house which we thought might be that her sisters have toast so K would smell toast. We also decided to incorporate some of the activities along with their signifiers that she does at her primary school so that she realises there will not be too much different. The story took a few different drafts as we checked it with Maureen from PAMIS as she knows the family well as well as made sure that we had enough different sensory items in the story for K to touch, smell and hear. The task of creating the story has shown me that it is not easy to create these stories. For ours we have had to make sure that everything is accurate to how K’s daily routine would be so as not to confuse her. As well as create the song and a line at each step of the story that can be sung.

The rest of this week has mostly been working autonomously on different smaller tasks that Jenny emailed to us. These were a variety of things including look at who I would call upon as a teacher if I had a child who challenged me with their behaviour or if a child had a specific physical disability. Being at PAMIS has opened my eyes to what support and help is out there. Previously, I had never heard of PAMIS and having a child in my classroom with a condition I did not understand or know about scared me. This has helped me to see some of the support that is in place for families of children with disabilities but the support, facilities and programmes are also available to teacher is so needed. I will carry this knowledge onto my future placements as well as into my teaching career. This will be very useful for me as I will be able to help children with learning and physical disabilities as well as let their families know where they can go for support if they do not already.

Another of the tasks that Jenny had suggested was to look for a community hub school and identify the important aspects of one. I find community hub schools interesting as they are a school, community centre and other facilities all in one building. These are great for communities as they become the centre of the community and make it easy for people to find what they need and access help and support. There is not a community hub school in Dundee at the moment so we could not visit one to see how the different facilities work together. There is one in Dunfermline that I am hoping to visit as my Dad lives close to it but I am not sure if I will be able to. I think it will be fascinating to see how these different places work together to create a community feeling with a lot of people under one roof. From a teaching perspective, I would also like to know what teaching in this school is like. I think it would be really useful to have access to lots of different facilities on your doorstep to help your children with any problems. 

This week has been mostly learning how to work through tasks on my own without needing constant guidance. This is an important skill to have for my future years at university as well as when I am qualified. Being able to work autonomously means that I can work on what is needing to be done when I am on placement and in practice without having to be told what to do.