Strides Newsletter Archives
- Academy of Teaching Excellence
- Counseling & Assessments
- Early Intervention
- Kaleidoscope Learning Center
- V-Excel Educational Trust
- Occupational Therapy
- V-Excel Remedial Center
- Satellite Centers
- Vocational Training / Youth Empowerment Services
Academy of Teaching Excellence
Happenings
Training and developing courses related to Special Education and Rehabilitation continues to be the main emphasis of Academy of Training and Excellence. Some of the courses till date have been on "Diploma in Autism Spectrum Disorder" from 2006 to 2011, Certificate Course in "Early Childhood Special Education- MR". Continuing Rehabilitation Education topics chosen were on "Inclusion and Austism Specturm Disorder", "Vocation Training" and "Learning Disability". Other V-Excel-certified courses on Learning Disability, Parents Awareness Training, Sensory Integration & Puppetry have been offered. Parent Awareness courses were run in Chennai, Erode and Thirunelveli. ATE is proud to say that we have trained more than 500 Special Educators, therapists and parents. Looking at our present statistics of people with special needs, India has more than 3 crores of people with various disabilities. The need for more rehabilitation professionals is great, but we are not able to meet the demand. Hence NGO's like V-Excel will be conducting Special Education related courses. V-Excel is also considering offering professional courses in "Care Giving". The process of getting approval for this RCI-related course has started. We also will be starting many courses shortly. Look for updates on our website.
Counseling & Assessments
Happenings
Our regular counseling sessions in V-Excel for trainees, children, teachers and parents continued. We met parents from all departments to address their concerns. Many parents are seeking continued sessions. We had art, play and music therapy for children and trainees and themes varied from their own idea of freedom to valley of flowers and Himalayas. Our group play therapy with KLC children and groups at YES continued. We have a new counselor and she started going to Sreyes to meet trainees in that center.
Our counseling desk was utilised as usual fully and we saw about 24 associates and some of them for follow-ups.
One of our counselors, was a director of the Blue Blue sky Choir which performed at the Adyar Youth Hostel in a music program arranged for Independence day. It received many accolades and we are proud of our children and teachers who worked hard to put this together.
We had a very touching Independence day celebration at Sharada where Puja and Neha were part of organizing singing by the children with small performance.
Some Special Initiatives
- With our new counselors help we made a "Opinions and Values" questionnaire for parents to understand their areas of concern for children and their expectations of us. We met all the parents from all the classes of KLC and had the questionnaire filled up by them.
- Counseling course - This year's foundation course for counseling started on 8th of August and we have seven participants
- YES – Parent support group – Anandhi and Sarmishta
The parents of our YES programme at Kousthubham came together for their first parent support group meeting for this academic year. The purpose behind this group is to encourage parents to give each other support, share their experiences, thereby providing an opportunity for others to benefit. This year, we divided the group into two for two reasons: on the basis of common theme of language as well as to increase active participation of group members. The first group met on 18th August, 2015 and the common concern about aggressive behavior emerged. The parents were taught the technique of foot massage through a demonstration on a parent volunteer to calm the children and to bond better. They felt empowered after the session and seemed to be enthusiastic about trying it out with their children. The second group met on 25th August, 2015 and shared concerns of their children’s future as well as everyday functioning. The members discussed different issues and they also gave suggestions to one another. On the whole, the counselors felt that both groups have taken off on an encouraging note.
Our Special Story This Month
A Brush of Freedom...
A seven year old girl walked into the play therapy room. The girl loved school but refused to write at times, stating she was too tired to do so and didnt feel like or perhaps feared it, her mother had reported.
After two sessions of playing with beeswax and creating her own fairy tales and characters, she saw the paintbrush and paints laid out for a wet on wet painting session. Very reluctant, very fearful to paint and draw, she declined the offer saying she didnt know how to and was very tired and didnt want to. The therapist assured her, that she didnt need to paint anything, she could simply play with the colour and do whatever she wanted to, whenever she was ready.
Half way through the session, as she saw the therapist painting, she approached her. Cautious and still reticent, she watched the paper being wet both sides and slowly her fingers embraced a big, broad paintbrush. The diluted blue touched the paper and swam across the page and she had no choice but to play with the colour. Slowly, she watched it move. It amused her, it made her smile. She picked another colour and watched them talk to each other, forming puddles and streaks.Ten minutes down, she asked for another paper saying she wanted to "play" some more.
The next session she unknowingly picked the colours that would be most relaxing and freeing and a session later she was painting rainbows and even beautifully formed camels in the desert, making up a story about it and writing the title of the story with paint in perfect cursive writing. All she asked was the therapist sat next to her and guided her by example on another paper when she needed help. She looked joyful and energized stating that she loved painting the most in the world and asked why there couldn't be painting everyday of the week. As an after thought she mentioned that she was first very scared of painting, just like she was scared of writing, but it was because she didn't know it was actually fun!
We have not worked directly with writing yet, but the therapist is confident that with more wet on wet sessions and bringing joy back into writing at home, the fearful monster might actually become a friend.
Early Intervention
Happenings
The need for school readiness for many children has led to starting group programmes during the week. At present the Early Intervention unit runs 4 group programmes on Saturdays and 1 group programme on a weekdays. The goals of the group programme are as follows.
- Addressing social behaviours issue
- Simulating classroom environments
- Addressing functional skills
- Facilitating communication
- Facilitating play skills
- Sensory integration
The children also attend individual sessions to strengthen specific goals and attend the group sessions too. The sessions are facilitated by Special Educators and Therapists, assisted by teacher aides. Children enjoy the group sessions and an enhanced performance is observed. Parents are given a home programme and an observation of specific issues are recorded.
Training time:The coordinator of the Tirunelveli centre, Jeyaseeli, and Therapist Muthukumar, attended a training programme in Chennai. The programme was aimed at giving insight into documentation, systems and procedures, assessments and programme implementation. Group programmes have commenced in Erode centre from last month.
Kaleidoscope Learning Center
It's been a busy busy month at KLC. Celebrations, field trips, the blue blue sky choir making its appearance yet again.
Independence Day was celebrated with the children singing in parts, a beautiful medley of Tamil, English and Hindi songs signifying three religions Hindu, Muslim and Christianity. Our Chief Guest, Mr. Anand from the Chennai Consulting Group who got the essence asked the children to sing the all time favourite patriotic song Raghupathy Raghav Raja Ram... The audience joined in and amidst the national fervour that filled the foyer, the flag was hoisted at the Shardha premises of V-Excel Educational Trust.
Onam was celebrated on 27th of August where the big whole school 'pookolam' was adorned by all the children and teachers. The story of Bahubali was told and the teachers dressed in traditional costume danced a simple dance around the beautiful flower rangoli. The VRC teachers , led by Lakshmi sang some lovely songs and helped the children to repeat parts of it which were rhythmic and repetitive. Very enjoyable complete with the sweet ragi kanji prepared by Vasanthi.
Field trips undertaken this month included Grades 5A and 7 going to Adyar Poonga, Grades 5A and 5 B and Grade 7 going to St. Thomas mount to study the landforms around that region. On 19th Grade 2 went for a visit to the Guindy park for a nature walk.
Grade 5A completed the construction of the 'ziggurat' as part of their practical work in the block on Mesopotamia.
The Blue Blue Sky Choir performed at the Youth Hostel in Indiranagar in a function called Svatantra on 14 of August. It was well-appreciated by all and many people in the audience were spellbound to hear our soloists, Abhishek Sanyal and Chinmayee.
The teachers continued their journey on their own biographies, with the guidance of Parimal the head of the counselling department. Through these in service trainings the teachers find their own strengths and weaknesses and patterns and work on their own inner path and it's something that makes changes very slowly but very visibly. We are very grateful for this ongoing facilitation in understanding ourselves and thereby surely understanding others a lot better!
V-Excel Educational Trust
Our Foray into Organic Gardening
GSM Services, a NGO dealing organic farming, have offered to train our vocational center teachers and trainees in this field. The training is free with a nominal cost for the materials alone. They visited our center in Mylapore. This event will be telecast on Makkal TV.
Blue ARTery
The ARTery, a Chennai-based arts portal and culture magazine, hosted 'Svatantara 2015', a four-day national festival of performing arts in association with Hamsadhwani, from Aug 13 to 16, at Youth Hostel, 2nd Avenue, Indira Nagar. As part of this program, our own Blue Blue Sky Choir performed on August 14, at 5:30 p.m. Seating was free on a first-come, first-served basis. The choir perfomed in front of a full house and their songs were much appreciated by those in the audience.
Independence Day
The Indian Independence Day was celebrated with great patriotic fervour in our centers in Adyar and R.A. Puram. Dr. Sudhir Krishnamurthi and Prof. J. Anand presided over the festivities.
The Thursday Ladies Club
The Thursday Ladies Club of Besant Nagar, Chennai hosted a program on August 27, 2015 at which they presented V-Excel with a cheque of Rs. 25,000.
The Thursday Ladies Club undertakes various social causes and raises funds through fashion shows, music extravaganzas and carnivals. Our sincere thanks to them and to Mrs. Kanthimathi (Jaya) Subramanian for making this possible.
Occupational Therapy
Greetings from Therapy and SI department.
The highlight of this month is the wonderful start of Sensory Group sessions for our KLC children. Children are enjoying the sensory play that are framed to satisfy their sensory needs and to overcome their defensiveness in order to explore the environment around and self. Many boys and girls who attended the sensory group sessions are intentionally coming to the therapists' room to say "Hello" and some expressed their willingness to come even though they don't belong to that particular group. This shows the way they liked it and added more responsibility for us to continue this good work.
V-Excel Remedial Center
August was a happening month in VRC. A meeting of the VRC team was organised and points discussed were mainly to bring in some streamlining and standardisation of the activities of VRC. It was agreed that we would meet once a month and also conduct some group remedial for children on Saturdays.We are hopeful of getting a Special Educator who can take remedials from 3-6 in the evenings.
The remedial sessions were more stabilised than in July, and we had assessments coming in for Sishya and Chettinad Vidhyashram.
A visit to Sishya School, Adyar was made along with Greeshma Vyas, our Counsellor. Ms. Shyamala, the Headmistress has expressed her willingness to take help from EI as she felt a lot of areas, if corrected at an early age, would reduce the occurrence of difficulties later.
With the Independence Day as the theme, lot of activites were planned for the children. It was Comprehension passages on India, Crossword puzzles,songs and Coloring activities. The children were also asked to brainstorm their ideas about "Independence". The children's expressions were amazing !!!!They came out with words like "freedom from fear", "freedom to express what we want", ""freedom from homework" One child, who comes from an economically backward home, said it is ""freedom from difficulties""!! It was a very satisfying session for the teachers as well as the children!
As there are several festivals coming up, we have planned activities to highlight the importance of each of them.
Satellite Centers
Happenings at our Satellite Centres
Nasik
Therapy department: Fresh guidelines were issued to the therapists of the school and training center with respect to record and log book maintenance of therapy sessions. It was reiterated that short-term goals can cover a period of 3 weeks and long term goals can be set for a period of 3 months and the goals that are set should be more realistic. The log book should contain parameter for therapy clearly mentioned for modalities, and exercise given should be listed down.
Independence Day celebration: Our children put up a great show during the Independence Day celebration at school. The flag was hoisted by the corporator of our area Mrs.Archana Thorat. Some of the children came dressed in costumes of freedom fighters like Jawaharlal Nehru, Bal gangadhar Tilak, Ahalya bai and Shubhash Chandra Bose. Some children danced to the song Nanna Munna rahi hoon.
One child Girishma Kohli came attired in the costume of Bharat Mata.Two teachers presented patriotic songs. Many parents attended the function.
Rakshabandhan celebration: During the last week of August, the teachers and children prepared lovely eco-friendly rakhis(wrist bands) during the activity hours in the afternoon. On 28th August Rakshabandhan was celebrated in the school. The teachers and children came dressed in colourful clothes and all the girls tied rakhis to the boys. The boys in turn gave small gifts to the girls.
Vocational Training / Youth Empowerment Services
August, in Sreyes, has been a time when a lot of planning was going on regarding the Carnival scheduled for the last week of September.
We had two visitors this month. Dr. Satyaprema who organises self-help groups and promotes millet recipes visited us with her associate Ms. Sitalakshmi. They have offered to train our parents and teachers in maida-free and sugar-free baking.
Ms. Indu who is part of the National Agro Foundation, offered to include groups from our institution in the farming activity at their proposed organic farm project.
A meeting was held with the parents of interns who were willing to be part of Cafe Samarth, our initiative, that will be manned by the interns and snacks prepared and served by them with parents to support. The menu was decided and the trainees who will be a part of it were identified. They have started learning to assist in making of the dishes.
Margaret comes in twice a week to guide the group in handicraft for products for the carnival.
Counselling sessions for the interns are there every week. The new interns have had their school doctor consultation with Dr. Karthiyayini.
The group's visit to Lalith Kala academy, in the second week, was a great experience. Each one, on return, expressed on paper what they felt. There was a variety of emotions and colours expressed and they had their own explanation to it.
The new trainees are being trained in the activities towards production. Right now, the unit is breathing Carnival and we are looking forward to a great carnival experience. Until next month...wishes from the VTU.
From YES
Gardening
Regarding gardening work at YES, GSM services, an organic gardening promoter has come forward to help us in our gardening work. They have given their estimate for organic kitchen gardening and the initial work has commenced. Our Gardening program was telecast on 3 consecutive Fridays on Makkal TV. In our garden flowers have started blooming, plants have started yielding vegetables like beans, okras and greens.
Visit to Lalith Kala Academy:
On 14 th August our trainees visited Lalith Kala Academy for an art exhibition organised by A2K Institute of Design. The paintings were the work of their students of class 4th to 12th. Our trainees appreciated the simple paintings and many trainees wrote their comments on the visitors note book.
Independence day
On August 15th we celebrated flag hoisting at Sre-yes. Dr. Sudhir Krishnamoorthi hoisted the flag. Our trainee Navya sang a song and Hariharan spoke about 'Clean India Drive'.