London: Day Thirteen

Today was a great day at the school and my last day for a little over a week! Libby and I are playing hooky tomorrow and next week the school is closed for half-term break! Today I spent the day with a group that only had two children: One boy and one girl! It was great because I had one-on-one time with the children. The boy is autistic and also has ADHD and the girl was a premature baby and has some kind of chromosomal disorder. They are both so precious. The boy is one of the most beautiful children that I have ever seen- all olive skin and brown eyes and so so sweet. He parades around the classroom making noises and yelping and clapping his hands constantly. He also has a need to climb and climb and climb- on anything that he can find. He apparently has improved vastly since he first arrived at the school- He used to climb to the ceiling and could only sit down for less than a minute at a time. I absolutely adore him! He is so wonderful and lovely. The little girl is so sweet and smart as well. She reminds me of Velma from Scooby Doo, if she were a young child. She wears these huge glasses that make her look completely adorable. She carries around a training potty to all of her classrooms because she is only about four and not toilet trained completely yet.

It was really great to get to work on my own with each of them individually. In maths (they call it "maths" in England), I worked with the little boy on matching and counting. There were pictures on a peace of paper and he had to match the picture to objects in different bowls. Once he found the object, he would count how many there were in the bowl and, because he doesn't speak, he would pick off one of the velcro letters from 1 to 5. Every time he started counting he would stare at my face for support every time he pointed to each object. I worked with him again in the Vygotsky classroom and he worked on matching again and on the game of memory (where you turn over 2 cards at a time and have to remember where they are in order to find the matching pair). This is incredibly difficult, and requires great patience, for a child who does not know how to take turns or how to slow down and wait. I literally had to hold his arms to keep him from turning over more than 2 cards but he did such a great job. I was completely in awe because it would seem as though he wasn't really looking at each picture, but after seeing a picture only once- he would not forget it for the rest of the game. He would find it and match it every single time. It was amazing. He was also brilliant at the matching game we played. There was a sketch of a triangle, of a square, and of a circle and then there were pictures of daily objects from a tire to a pizza. He had to look at the real-life object and match it to its shape. He is an extremely sensory oriented child so he would be happy placing the object on top of the shape and feeling around the edges to be sure he was right. He really is brilliant- I was so proud of him.

In literacy the teacher was out so there was a substitute and I worked with the girl on practicing taking off and putting on clothes. This is a sore spot for her mother because she literally won't put on a coat or take off a coat on her own. She did a wonderful job though by the end of the class and got a reward when she finally took her shoe off all by herself. The best part of the day for the children though was cooking in the Social Development classroom. These two specific children are very sensory and understand things better when they can touch and feel it. They had the chance to pour different items into the bowl to make cereal bars: rice krispies, raisins, seeds, honey etc. Then they got to taste each of the individual items. Then they got to mix all of the items together with their hands. They were both so happy, we couldn't keep their hands out of their mouths. Ah, they are both so precious!

Also, I talked to my grandparents and my cousin, Nicholas last night on Skype and I wanted to clarify something about the seizures that many of the children at the school have. These are not the convulsive seizures where a person collapses on the ground and their muscles go crazy. The seizures the children have are epileptic seizures where the children remain completely conscious, with eyes open, and simply fall out of complete consciousness of their surroundings. It is mainly discovered when the child loses concentration and spaces out in class and you cannot discover why. One of the little girls at the school has seizures like this all day long and a lot of them have it frequently. These seizures affect about 0.5%-1% of the population. It is really quite scary. If you would like to learn more about them, you can click the link above! Love you all lots! Xxxxx