Shane is on a plane right now and will arrive in Brisbane tomorrow morning! How exciting :) Jeremy and I were just arguing over who is going to cook dinner for him tomorrow night...hahaha. J is cooking now, so tomorrow I will be doing the cooking. Pad Thai, mmmmm...except that we were just at the grocery store and I forgot the rice noodles, which are generally a very important ingredient in Pad Thai. Ah well, that can be easily remedied. On his blog he mentioned that he thinks that he "won't understand people most of the time, but will pretend to". Bahahaha...I'd say he'll understand about 90% about what they say and the other 10% will go straight over his head. I mean...EFTPOS? Fairdinkum? Unco? Would you like some school vouchers? Bottle-o? Tracky daks? Daggy? Arvo? Sticky beak? WHAT ARE THEY SAYING?? I know now, but there are still some that trip me up every so often!
Spent today, the first "official" day of my holiday at my friend Jules' house working on an assignment. Well, first we had lunch and played with her baby for awhile, then I dragged myself away to assignment yuckiness. It's good to have it started though. Two pages down, 13 more go. Oh dear. Jules has a Canadian nanny, which is pretty cool. Her name is Jen and she's from somewhere in Ontario near Windsor...I always forget. It's nice to have someone who understands random Canadian-ness...like today I was eating a delicious cookie and said "Mr Christie, you make good cookies" and she laughed, as is appropriate! The Aussies just kind of looked at me like I was not making any sense, which I suppose is mostly true. Then Jen told me about how she was out with friends and someone sneezed and she said "Robitussin!" and they all thought she was nuts as well. Jules will be very very sad when her visa expires and she is left nanny-less. She used to be in my year of speech path, then had a baby, and now is in the year behind me and Jen is essential for her sanity and survival while she's in class and writing assignments. She keeps asking if i have any amazing Canadian friends who want to come over next year and be Billy's nanny. It's actually a sweet deal. It's a live-in position, and her house was just built last year. There are kitchens and bathrooms on both floors, so Jules and her family live upstairs and the nanny gets the whole downstairs area. Jen's room has sliding doors which come out to the in-ground pool. She does some housework and cooking and of course takes care of Billy, who is a darling. She has weekends off and is always out exploring Australia, checking out Byron Bay, Sunny Coast, etc with a big group of friends that she's made over here. Jules and Bruce are the most easy going people ever and Jules always goes on and on about how great Jen is and how she has no idea what she'll do when she's gone. My friend Nicole and I go there almost every week, and Jen sits and has lunch with us and we talk and laugh. Honestly, I wish I had a job like that when I first moved here!! (Except the live-in part would have been weird, and that's kind of what makes it affordable for Jules since part of Jen's wages include what she would be paying for rent). So yes, more Canadians getting a good name around here...always nice to hear!
Monday, September 26, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
So my little brother will be here in 4 days - how crazy is that?? He's started a blog as well to talk about his adventures down under. In case anyone is interested, it's http://shane-nomadsland.blogspot.com/.
I don't have any big plans for my week off. Hopefully the weather is nice so that we can get some good bike rides in, hang out on the South Bank "beach" and maybe get out to the Gold Coast one day. I also have a ton of work to do on that FAS assignment. Urgh.
Last night was SWIM wine & cheese - my favourite med event! Wine, cheese, what's not to like? We got together at a friend's place beforehand and played board games...new awesome board game heads up - Ticket to Ride. So cool. We didn't get to finish because we had to leave for the wine and cheese but I'm really excited to play it again soon! You build train empires and it's all strategic and stuff. It didn't sound like the sort of game I'd like, but...surprise!
Tomorrow night we're hosting a little dinner party with a Moroccan theme. My friend Jen has a "tagine" which I had never heard of until she mentioned it. Wikipedia describes it as:
A tajine, or tagine (Berber: tajin), is a dish from North Africa, that is named after the special earthenware pot in which it is cooked. A similar dish, known as tavvas, is found in the cuisine of Cyprus. The traditional tajine pot is formed entirely of a heavy clay, which is sometimes painted or glazed. It consists of two parts: a base unit that is flat and circular with low sides, and a large cone or dome-shaped cover that rests inside the base during cooking. The cover is so designed to promote the return of all condensation to the bottom. With the cover removed, the base can be taken to the table for serving.
Should be fun!!!
I don't have any big plans for my week off. Hopefully the weather is nice so that we can get some good bike rides in, hang out on the South Bank "beach" and maybe get out to the Gold Coast one day. I also have a ton of work to do on that FAS assignment. Urgh.
Last night was SWIM wine & cheese - my favourite med event! Wine, cheese, what's not to like? We got together at a friend's place beforehand and played board games...new awesome board game heads up - Ticket to Ride. So cool. We didn't get to finish because we had to leave for the wine and cheese but I'm really excited to play it again soon! You build train empires and it's all strategic and stuff. It didn't sound like the sort of game I'd like, but...surprise!
Tomorrow night we're hosting a little dinner party with a Moroccan theme. My friend Jen has a "tagine" which I had never heard of until she mentioned it. Wikipedia describes it as:
A tajine, or tagine (Berber: tajin), is a dish from North Africa, that is named after the special earthenware pot in which it is cooked. A similar dish, known as tavvas, is found in the cuisine of Cyprus. The traditional tajine pot is formed entirely of a heavy clay, which is sometimes painted or glazed. It consists of two parts: a base unit that is flat and circular with low sides, and a large cone or dome-shaped cover that rests inside the base during cooking. The cover is so designed to promote the return of all condensation to the bottom. With the cover removed, the base can be taken to the table for serving.
Should be fun!!!
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Time keeps on ticking away - only a few more weeks of classes till I am FINISHED this degree!
As I've mentioned, I have really been liking my Ed Queensland prac. Last week I started at a special school, and it's a bit more challenging. Obviously the service delivery is different, since you have to think about the child's abilities, moods, etc. I helped with a couple of groups and administered a standardized assessment to a five year old in three sessions over the day because a five year old can't really be expected to attend to a boring test for 1.5 hours straight!!! Assessments are a bit of a weak spot for me because I haven't had the chance to do very many. They all have different rules - you need to know about basals, ceilings, what prompts you're allowed to use, specific ways of scoring, and so on. My CEs this term have been really nice and are making a point to try to find kids who need assessing so that I can do it. I've done a some SPATs CELF-P2, a few CELF screeners, a CELF-4 and a PLS-4 over the last couple of weeks...names are not really important, they're basically all just language and phonology tests. It's also important because Canada requires you to have x amount of hours for child assessment, so this adds to those hours. Of course, Ontario is the most annoying province for requirements and don't count professional development hours - YAY! I was thinking of where I'd like to live in Canada, and Kingston, Halifax and Victoria were all promising options. Jeremy seems to be in agreement. However, due to Ontario's unrealistic requirements, Kingston may have to be taken off the list. We'll see though.
So, one more week of classes/clinic and then we get a week break. Shane conveniently arrives during my break so it should be a good chance to show him around Brisbane. I've already decided that he will not be jetlagged at all. Heh.
I also need to be doing work on a big assignment about fetal alcohol syndrome. We need to use this ICF framework with a bunch of codes to describe a kid's case with reference to the literature and then we need to come up with a management plan. I think it's a 15 page paper or something? Yuck. I've looked up all the codes and researched some articles but I need to force myself to actually start writing the thing. It doesn't help that FAS is one of the most depressing things I can think of. There was a kid at the special school with it who can't talk at all and it just made me want to cry.
Today I'm going to Pranika's house to work on our Community Education project. I actually think our topic is kind of cool. It's for the Hear and Say Centre, a charity organization which provides therapy to kids after they've had a cochlear implant. Our job is to create a website specifically for their Outreach program, which is for parents/kids who live in rural and remote areas and aren't able to come in for regular therapy. Instead, they hold weekly sessions over Skype, come to the city twice a year, and have the therapists visit them at home twice a year. To be an audio-visual therapist doing this sort of work, you need to be a speech pathologist or audiologist and also do three extra years of on-the-job training. On our website, we'll have a bunch of videos which show examples of therapists using strategies with kids, printable resources, information on how to set up and use Skype, a rural section and useful links. We also need to make a brochure about the Outreach program since the one they have is a little out of date. Finally, our group has to write a paper discussing why we chose to present our resources this way, who our audience was and how we targeted them and so on. We also have to make a poster and present at a community education day to speech pathologists who will come around the our booth and ask questions. It's a pretty big project but we're in groups of 7, so everything gets divided pretty nicely.
Okay, so I've pretty much just rambled on about projects that no one wants to hear about, but that took a long time to write so i'm leaving it there!!!
As I've mentioned, I have really been liking my Ed Queensland prac. Last week I started at a special school, and it's a bit more challenging. Obviously the service delivery is different, since you have to think about the child's abilities, moods, etc. I helped with a couple of groups and administered a standardized assessment to a five year old in three sessions over the day because a five year old can't really be expected to attend to a boring test for 1.5 hours straight!!! Assessments are a bit of a weak spot for me because I haven't had the chance to do very many. They all have different rules - you need to know about basals, ceilings, what prompts you're allowed to use, specific ways of scoring, and so on. My CEs this term have been really nice and are making a point to try to find kids who need assessing so that I can do it. I've done a some SPATs CELF-P2, a few CELF screeners, a CELF-4 and a PLS-4 over the last couple of weeks...names are not really important, they're basically all just language and phonology tests. It's also important because Canada requires you to have x amount of hours for child assessment, so this adds to those hours. Of course, Ontario is the most annoying province for requirements and don't count professional development hours - YAY! I was thinking of where I'd like to live in Canada, and Kingston, Halifax and Victoria were all promising options. Jeremy seems to be in agreement. However, due to Ontario's unrealistic requirements, Kingston may have to be taken off the list. We'll see though.
So, one more week of classes/clinic and then we get a week break. Shane conveniently arrives during my break so it should be a good chance to show him around Brisbane. I've already decided that he will not be jetlagged at all. Heh.
I also need to be doing work on a big assignment about fetal alcohol syndrome. We need to use this ICF framework with a bunch of codes to describe a kid's case with reference to the literature and then we need to come up with a management plan. I think it's a 15 page paper or something? Yuck. I've looked up all the codes and researched some articles but I need to force myself to actually start writing the thing. It doesn't help that FAS is one of the most depressing things I can think of. There was a kid at the special school with it who can't talk at all and it just made me want to cry.
Today I'm going to Pranika's house to work on our Community Education project. I actually think our topic is kind of cool. It's for the Hear and Say Centre, a charity organization which provides therapy to kids after they've had a cochlear implant. Our job is to create a website specifically for their Outreach program, which is for parents/kids who live in rural and remote areas and aren't able to come in for regular therapy. Instead, they hold weekly sessions over Skype, come to the city twice a year, and have the therapists visit them at home twice a year. To be an audio-visual therapist doing this sort of work, you need to be a speech pathologist or audiologist and also do three extra years of on-the-job training. On our website, we'll have a bunch of videos which show examples of therapists using strategies with kids, printable resources, information on how to set up and use Skype, a rural section and useful links. We also need to make a brochure about the Outreach program since the one they have is a little out of date. Finally, our group has to write a paper discussing why we chose to present our resources this way, who our audience was and how we targeted them and so on. We also have to make a poster and present at a community education day to speech pathologists who will come around the our booth and ask questions. It's a pretty big project but we're in groups of 7, so everything gets divided pretty nicely.
Okay, so I've pretty much just rambled on about projects that no one wants to hear about, but that took a long time to write so i'm leaving it there!!!
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