The little light house is a learning and developmental facility for children with special needs aged below 6 years to help each one of them reach their maximum potentiality. The facility is aimed at providing tuition free special education and therapeutical services to the children. This is achieved through a reliable and strong trans-disciplinary team of six professionals who work hand in hand to achieve the goal. The team involves a certified special needs teacher, 5 assistants whom amongst them are occupational and physical therapists, technology specialist, a speech pathologist and a nurse.
During that period the facility had 10 children aged between 1 to 3 years. Within the class was a special case of a 3 year old male child who suffered from Down Syndrome. Down Syndrome (DS) is a medical condition that results from chromosomal abnormality that cause a wide range of physical and clinical symptoms affecting individuals of different races and social classes. The child identified had a sight problem and in this case wore glasses, barely used his fingers but his whole hand during communication in sign language. In addition he could rarely speak a couple of words.
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Early childhood is an important stage for developmental milestone of motor, social-emotional, cognitive and language skills. Many factors affect this skills one of them being Down syndrome. To emphasis on this we discuss the four domains of child development stated above that were evident signs with our subject of study reinforced in Denver II screening tests. To start with, is the personal-social aspect. The subject was observed to take a longer time in learning to interact with other children in class. In addition was in possession of playing toys but was not that willing to share it with his friends. This is contrary to our expectation of a child to get along with other people at this age.
Secondly the child was noted to have speech and language impairments. For instance, he was at the early stages of learning sign language and learning how to talk but he was not capable of speaking more than two words. However he did not use any recognizable form of sign language.
Furthermore the subjects motor skills and could be seen clearly as limited. He could walk too fast and was usually in a hurry. On the other hand he had to hold his hands since the joints were flexible and this made it hard for him to properly coordinate his movements.
Objectives of The Class Room
In order for the little light house to accomplish their mission, the special needs teacher has a set number of objectives for every day to ensure that she delivers quality education to the children.
To begin with the teacher gives the students access to normal curriculum as much as possible. For instance, she allows the children to access and watch television, play with the rest and sing songs and interpreting the videos using signs. Moreover she uses a microphone while in class to communicate properly. This impacts the verbal skills of the children.
In addition, the teacher is aimed at encouraging the children’s interaction with the others. She does this by going round the class at the beginning of the day and makes sure she greets every one of them either by a handshake or a light touch. This greatly impacts the social development impact of the developmental category.
