Animal,sensory,arts and crafts day for children with disabilities
Today was breakfast at 7am, so not quite as early as yesterday! Today was our first day of activities, which we started at 11am at Letaba special needs school.
Before our start with the school we had a trip into town to pick up some more materials for the art and craft activities that we had decided to do.
Today the children had been split into 2 groups, this was a sensory group for the less able children and the arts and craft group for the more able bodied children. The children were in different rooms so this gave us a good chance to work one to one with the children. In the morning we worked with the younger children, and in the afternoon 
groups we had the older children.
The craft group had planned to make some primate based paper chains with the children, allowing them 
to relate this to monkeys who swing from a tree. However the children decided that they wanted to wear these instead of hanging them around the room. They then became very creative with all of their activities, making other items to go with their monkey necklaces. One little gil even decided to make a belt, so I’m sure she will be in the fashion industry one day! These activities were great fun, and again, taught us alot about the children that we had been working with and their abilities and needs.
Recording their emotions and behaviours was a very important part of our role in working with the children as this is something that the teachers have less knowledge on, due to the short staffing issues and 
no therapists. These behaviours will then be given to the teacher, Susan who is running the project with us.
The sensory group also had some great 
activities and used music and singing to start the day. This gave them them an opportunity to see which children were more aware and interactive before they started other activities. It was great for us as volunteers to have a smaller group with these children as we could spend more time with them, helping and focusing them with their needs. They had made up a hello song about monkeys.
They then moved on to make a collage of monkey based pictures , using different sensory materials such as grass and sticks to put on their pictures. These were good for the children to touch and feel the different textures of the materials they were putting on the pictures. The volunteers helped the children make the pictures, helping them to 
press on items onto the paper with their hands and paint that also they could feel on their hands.
The observations were paticulary important with 
this group, due to the less able children not getting enough attention in class. Again this is due to lack of staff that have been provided by the government to the school. This is something they are desperately trying to fight against.
The older children then worked with us after their lunch, which was a different group with different activities applying to their ages and again their abilities. The volunteers worked with the arts and craft group using an animal based concept with lots of drawings and making things. 2 of the children made a picture and wrote a letter to a previous volunteer that they had remembered from March for us to give to them. The pictures said that they loved their friend who they 
had met the last time. This was nice as it made us realise that the children remembered well when Yebo were at the school a few months ago, and also last year.
The sensory group again did a lot of painting and some singing, the children drew lots of monkeys in their drawings and other animals. We are looking forward to taking them to the animal sanctuary this coming Friday.
During the break between each group there were a lot of children gathering arund us, who wanted to get into each of the rooms. Some of this behaviour began to get difficult as the children started trying to fight each-other to get inside of the doors to the activities rooms which were both locked. A few of the children would hit each-other and their behaviour became very attention seeking and angry at times.
The day was great fun and we are looking forward to working with them again in the next week, developing activities that can hopefully be used in a sustainable program which we will try to acheive for the school while we are visiting.