Special Needs School Visit in Rawang ~ :)

Special Needs School “Ideas Autism Centre” Visit

Learning education course takes you to variety types of school to widen your thinking ~ by me

Last Monday, 10/11/2014.  I had been given a chance to tour one of the special need school organized by Ideas organization. It was the centre for educating children with Autism. Autism is where a child having mental condition that challenges them in having proper communication problem, forming relationship with people and understanding abstract concepts. The chances for boy to have this condition are 4 times greater than a girl.

During the trip to the schools, it really amazed me on how some of a few special need educators will go as far as needed just to help the students to learn since I knew how great is the efforts and pressure it takes to stand on this positions. Move on, the school is actually a bungalow house rather than a school situated deep in Rawang where you can feel the authentic green scenery of a forest everywhere. The reason it is home school environment is to provide home based stimulation to the students. Here, the teacher sees the students need more practically in being able to take care of themselves using home environment to familiarise and ease the student’s anxiety. The greenery environment too is parts of the variables to help students learn without too much disturbance. During the interview with the principal, we came upon the reason why this home school here. Firstly, their mission is too trained and educates the children so that they will be able to go for the mainstream school either in normal class or special need class. Of course their syllabus won’t be the same as the stated in the national syllabus. For instance, they will only learn Bahasa Malaysia, English language and Mathematics where the standard have been lowered to the level of each of the children. But, they will have addition of art, sensory, domestic skills and water play sessions to cover up for their other need.

What unique about children with autism is although they may look physically as 5 years old kid, they may not be able to say any words and think properly since they have issues in mental development in these areas. That is why lowering the learning standards will helps lessen the burden of learning otherwise it will just overload their cognitive process. You may give instruction such as “Please give me the pencil back and sit down into your chair”, children with autism can only process the first part of the instruction which is giving back the pencil to you but they cannot remember the next steps which are too sit down because their storage memory is very low. Upon coming to this subject, the school prepared various teaching materials which specialized in helping students to remember the steps they need to do such as “picture lane”. This “picture lane” enables children to stick a card consists of picture with the word of an action in a sequence. This scaffolds thinking process of the children of what they need to do next. This remarkable invention helps a lot with mental processing and benefits the process of learning better. Examples of “Picture of Lane”:

The school will select students that come from middle and low income family by accessing household income divided by number of family, and if it’s below 1,000 for a person they will accepted the children.

Calculation:

Income (RM 6000) divided by number of family members (6) = 1,000

Though the children and parents need to undergo various procedures such as interview before the learning takes place to inform the school management of what the children is capable of. For instance, writing and recognising alphabets. The facilities provided are very good considering the size of the students (28 students). They have 1 principal, 6 full time facilitators (teachers), 1 occupational therapy and 1 general worker for cleaning and cooking. By next month, they aim for a full time speech therapy. The students have outdoor trips, swimming session (hydro therapy), horse riding, gardening, pet caring (cats and rabbits mainly) and cooking activities aside from their syllabus. All this activities are sponsored by Ideas organization except for swimming session where parents need to pay RM10 for their children. All the coach chosen are specialized and qualified in helping the students. Based from the observation, the students are really close with the principal and the facilitators, maybe because the treatment and family kind of relationship that the school gives them.

When we visit the classroom, most of the teacher was having 1 to 1 session with students for reading session and the types of books they use is simple story books, accompanied by toys to keep it interesting. Only few students were reading because majority of the students were standing and need to go to the toilet with the teacher assistance. Interestingly, they put the table and line up a chair on the wall side to keep the students on place to avoid any unwelcome escape when the learning session is on. Believe me, when they escape, they will run and go to other places other than the table and chair. The class were stratified into 3 groups of autism ( mild, moderate and severe).What I couldn’t really agree with is the fact the price of one individual real-based situation toys to stimulates students learning is way too expensive than it looks. It really doesn’t make any sense because the toy price should be between RM 20 but the seller sells it at RM 60. I know they need to make profits but this is too much considering it is toys to helps students with disabilities to learn.

This is what I thought…In a nutshell, having the visits make me compare and contrast the way lessons were taught in mainstream class and home based class, view the principal have in minds and teaching aids required to achieve goals set by the school. Thank you  J.