Respite Ideas!

As part of my placement  I am creating a list of ideas/activities for respite workers to do with their service recipients . One of the common questions that my supervisor gets in regards to working with respite care participants is what activities can they do together that are LOW COST and FUN. I have created a pinterest board that I hope helps people find creative, fun and enjoyable activities.

I hope that this pinterest board can be an inspiration for those working with individuals with special needs. I am planning on becoming a respite worker-likely with individuals who have Autism Spectrum Disorder.

For those who are wondering, respite work is described as "planned short-term and time-limited breaks for families and other unpaid caregivers of children with a developmental delay and adults with an intellectual disability in order to support and maintain the primary care giving relationship."

Aside from just being a "break" for the primarily caregivers, respite care should also be an enjoyable and can  be a learning experience for the person receiving the care. Hopefully my list helps create a more enjoyable experience for both the caregiver and the individual receiving care!

Calm Down Bottle--

Test! Test! Test!

I am doing this for school. Learning how to imbed slide shows from Sliderocket.com

On blogs and learning to accept the "imperfect"

Although this is my second blog, I am still very new to blogging. Upon creating this blog, my first blog was only a few weeks old and I still was unsure about many aspects. I easily created the account and set up the blog but I had difficulty understanding the customization features and how to create a blog that I felt represented what I wanted to say. This frustrated me and is what has held me back in the past. I was nervous about creating a blog that didn't look, function and read exactly the way that I wanted it to. In short, I wanted the "perfect" blog or nothing at all.

But starting the Tech Ed. course helped me push past that because whether my blog was perfect or not, I am expected to have one. And that both excited and terrified me. So I have been doing some exploring and learning. Tonight, I learned how to download a template from a free site and upload it to my blog, I learned how to edit the HTML to take out the ad boxes that came with the template and I learned how to change my URL and blog name. And as I did it , I thought "I should blog about this!" which isn't yet a natural thought for me.

But what I am learning is that creating a blog that is "perfect" isn't really possible. It is a learning process like anything else and  the more time we spend at it, the better our blogs will be and they will start to represent what we want them to. People aren't born bloggers just like they aren't born readers, writers, mathematicians or scientists! That will be our job as teachers, to help students learn these skills.

So as we start off this year, I am looking forward to learning how we can help our students, through technology and other means to be successful learners just as I am learning how to be a successful teacher (and blogger!)