Peds Party!

Part 1
I was excited to finally start peds.  That is where I expect to feel most comfortable and most useful.  Sometimes in geriatrics, I did not feel exceptionally useful, mostly because the client I thought I was going to have was not the client that I ended up treating 80% of the time, so I always felt a little unprepared, but this is peds.  School, right?  Everyone is expected to be there every day.  Whew!  Time for a change ...

I had no real concerns today, because I knew the planned part of the session was going to be run by my instructor.  We were just going to observe pencil grasps and coloring/writing styles and then play games with the kids that used fine motor skills.

Coming into this semester, I did not realize how complicated writing and coloring were.  My own children never had trouble in this area, so it all seemed easy and natural.  After a class on handwriting skills and problems, I had a completely different take on writing, what students are expected vs capable of doing at age 5, and the perceptual problems that can go along with writing.  As I watched the children write their name, I could sort of get an idea of what they were doing cognitively.  They were having to visualize the letters in their name from their memory.  These letters were no where around for them to look at.  There was a large variation as to how well the kids could do this.  Some seemed to struggle with it, while others looked as if they had attained the skill a long time ago.  Also, in class we learned the developmental ages at which it is typical for children to learn to draw certain line patterns.  The student that I had, X, could not "draw" an X correctly.  It would seem that drawing an "X" would be just as easy as a "+", but, in fact, the skill to draw and "X" comes a full 6 months after the skill to draw a "+".  This knowledge was reinforced by what I saw in fieldwork with "X."

In my experience in working with children, if you treat them with respect and in a positive attitude, most of the time, you will get the exact thing back.  When I met my client this week, I talked to both children like I would like to be spoken to, not like babies and not like rocket scientists.  I tried to let them make most of the choices (within choice sets that I had given) and respected what they wanted to do, though maybe it wasn't my preference.  I was met with 2 sweet, very respectful and positive children who really wanted to please whomever was watching them or looking at their work.  I feel like they did their best, and I tried to do mine, too.

In the next 2 sessions, I am looking forward to really interacting with these 2 children and helping them with their school skills, so that they can have a more productive and fun school year.

Something helpful that I learned today is that there are different ways to accomplish a better pencil grip than just the fancy tools that are sold in education supply catalogs. Doing simple things like making crayons shorter, using fatter pencils and using other common objects to be held under their arm or in the fingers that are not used for writing are lots of times just as effective to make grasps better or writing/coloring easier for the client.