Week 7

Sept. 23-27, 2013

A couple of weeks ago, we started incorporating a transition student (Erica) to be the cheerleader for this student (Morgan) of ours. Erica is able to walk independently with a walker, but uses a wheelchair to get around at school. Morgan is unable to walk independently and uses a motorized wheelchair that is able to move by joystick, someone pushing it from behind, or with the headrest. This week, Erica is getting more and more pumped up to work with us and Morgan. It is so sweet. I love to see Erica's face and the joy she receives for rooting Morgan on. The progress that Morgan has demonstrated thus far has been mind-blowing. By tilting her head back on the headrest, she moves forward. She quadrupled her progress in a matter of days.

This week, we screened another child who has microphthalmia with no vision in his right eye, peripheral vision in his left eye. This kid blew all of our socks off! He has excellent orientation skills, is able to trail beautifully, has good contrast vision, and appears to be scanning when he moves his body in space. I think Bryan and Nancy wanted to fight over this one. This kid is so cute - I don't blame them. :)

I am working more with a student named Grace. This lesson meant a lot to me, because I felt like I was really connecting with the student and helping her past her fears of being afraid. She tends to be whiny about every twist and turn she takes and she is constantly questioning out loud if she is going the right way or to verbalize that she does not know where she is. At first, this student was extremely challenging for me in the sense that I did not know how to draw boundaries around her constant questions. After using coins within our lessons to encourage her to ask less questions, I found that this idea was genius! This made me feel good for coming up with something on my own! I started out by telling her I would only give her 4 questions (or coins) and she was only allowed to ask a question if she gave up a coin. By the end of the lesson, with as many coins as she had left, she got to trade them in for a prize (Starbursts). This was a really fun experiment with her and I did see some major improvements.