Day one at Stella Maris School

Today was our first day at the Stella Maris school. Each group did a presentation on a different part of our field; the presentations included speech therapy in general, fluency, voice, articulation, language, autism, augmenative communication, and cognition. For a lot of us these were our first presentations and they all went pretty smoothly! Dr.All seemed very pleased and the teachers were really appreciative.

It looks like we have a lot of work ahead of us this week. The teachers brought up stories about some of their kids and we will probably be screening a lot of students.  The teachers brought up a lot of concerns about their students hearing and articulation, so it looks like we will be putting our Fluharty kits to good use. We are also going to give interjection advice for the teachers to follow once we leave. We believe that Stella Maris could benefit a lot from our work here and we are really hoping to set up a speech therapy program for them. A couple of teachers even expressed interest in going to school to earn the degree.

Overall I believe the school had a humbling effect on all of us today. The school was only for students who had a disability and it was very overwhelming. As an undergraduate in have nor had the chance took work with clients yet so it was a very new experience. In the United States therapists like to use inclusion to integrate these children into the general classrooms. Here the students are isolated to this one school, some even live on campus. It is very different then what we experience back home.

These students were very loving and welcoming toward us, but from our classroom you could hear a couple of children throwing tantrums. This has to be difficult on the teachers there. A classroom full of children with disabilities has to be way harder to handle then a room full of normal functioning children.  We believe we can help these teachers create a better form of communication with their students in the hope that it will make their job a bit easier. They all have so much to deal with it and they amazed us all with their upbeat attitudes.

Kayla Keys