I can’t believe that I only have one week left here!

This week has been pretty busy as we had to finish the multi-sensory story this week as K goes back to school on Tuesday. At first, I thought this would be easy as all we had to do was buy the sensory items for the story. However, it was a lot harder than I expected it to be. Finding the items that we needed for the story was difficult. When we wrote the story, we did not really think about where we would get the items we wanted. The most difficult item to create was the signifier for one of the teachers at the high school. He had told us that he was going to use his beard as his signifier for K. We had to create something that felt like his beard. What do we use for that? We had thought of several ideas but none seemed quite right. I had thought that creating this sensory story was going to be relatively easy but even creating the boards was proving to be a small challenge. We eventually found the best we could to re-create the beard which turned out to be a paintbrush bristles cut off the paintbrush and stuck together. This needed me to use skills that I never thought this placement would require me to use as well as we need to think outside the box to create the something that was the most realistic in touch to a real beard. Some of the other steps of the story created smaller challenges like making sure the voice recording clips were clear and loud on the talking tiles and creating a green flashing light with tissue paper and a torch. Using these creative skills to make this story was not the kind of skills that I thought I would develop at this placement. How to create the items that K would come across in real life was challenging and required me to think outside the box and away from how I would normally create something. These skills will also be transferable to a classroom for arts and crafts lessons or for creating things for around my classroom. Being able to think of different ways to make items or to replicate items will be good to show children and will be a fun learning opportunity for my future pupils.

I also had a meeting with K’s mum today. We were hoping that K would be there but she had unfortunately taken ill during the night so it was just her mum and sisters. As it was still the school holidays we were meeting at Dundee Science Centre so that the other girls would have something to do while we were there. All PAMIS families have access to Dundee Science Centre for free as part of the PAMIS Golden Ticket which means that they and their family members can get in for free. This means that families with children with PMLD have somewhere that they can go that helps to get the child with PLMD out of the house. The science centre has lots for a disabled child to do as well as being relatively wheelchair friendly is that is needed. As well as this, the siblings also have a place that they can run around and explore that is not solely for the disabled child.

We were meeting the child’s mum to speak to her about K’s digital passport. We took a printed copy of the passport with us so that she could see what was already in it as well as what was not. We had only briefly met the mum before so it was a good chance to speak to her about the passport and the story. She loved all the pictures that were in the passport and it was good to learn some context about some of the pictures. We were hoping to incorporate some videos into the passport as well as some information on K’s typical school day. Her mum also wanted us to add in information on her movements and information and x-rays from a recent surgery she had. As the digital passports are for the family it is important that it has the information that the families want people to know. We also showed her the sensory story and checked that the steps were correct. She asked us to change the first line of the story as we had that there would be the smell of toast in the morning and she said that there was not but there was coffee. Something coffee smelling was easier to get a hold of than something toast smelling so this made creating the story a lot easier. Getting to spend time with the family helped me to get to know them a lot more. I think that getting to know them more will help us to finish the story and passport as I will know more about them and K. 

Working on the digital passport this week has been quite challenging. Most of the passport is already done which means that adding in slides so that they flow smoothly with what is already there is a little challenging. I do not have the best computer knowledge so keeping everything the same was difficult. The most difficult bit was adding in pictures as all of the pictures in the passport have a double border plus writing so moving and adding new pictures took a lot of fidgety work. Previously, I did not know how to add links and I had to figure out how to do this for the passport. I did not expect to learn how to improve my computer skills during this placement but working on the passport has required me to.