Tuesday and Wednesday of Institutes weeks are lecture days. Drew and I went to classes to learn about issues in physical, physiological, and intellectual areas of development that can better help us to do Noah's program. The Institutes doesn't want you to go home doing any program that you don't fully understand why you are doing it.
This week was lecture series 8 -- the last lecture series they do, and it was a great couple of days, as always. We learned about the swimming program in which young babies and severely brain injured children are taught to swim. In short, swimming is a life saving activity that grows the respiratory system and the brain. Plus, kids love it brain-injured or not.
We also learned about the various types of allergies and how they affect the body of the brain-injured child. Heavy metal, yeast, and all other sorts of physiological problems worsen allergies, and we must be very careful with cleaning products, make-up products, perfumes, and other chemicals that could give Noah problems. This is also why the diet needs to be organic if at all possible, the water needs to be filtered, and the food needs to be rotated. We know all about this already, but it was good review.
We learned then about language development and how to best do a language program to move the kids from facilitating all their needs to speaking them with their mouths. It is a lot to go into, but some very neat programs -- and a lot of fun. Lastly we talked about advanced problem solving, which is what it sounds like -- giving the child a "problem" and some choices to choose from. Noah is quite good at it, and it provides good evaluation for where Noah is intellectually.
And since taking pictures of the lecture hall seems a bit boring, I'm putting a couple of cute pictures of the boys traveling and hanging out in the clinic.
No comments:
Post a Comment