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!!!