MY WARDROBE

Everyone in Fiji loves to wear brightly coloured, floral printed shirts, skirts and tops. I have cottoned on (chortle, chortle) to the fashion here and have had a few sulu/jabas made to get in touch with the Fijian culture.

Here's a picture of my week's washing (minus the disintegrating underwear):



I thought I'd better make the most of it because I'm not sure if I can get away with wearing such loud/bright colours back in black Melbourne. If I continue working with children, hopefully I can have a good excuse to be wearing these tops to work.

PROGRESS

Things are chugging along slowly at school. I have just over 3 and a half months left and my grand plan is to have most mini-projects finished in 3 weeks. This is for the sole purpose of being able to relax in my last term at school, monitor if my resources will get used and enjoying my time at school rather than stressing over things not being completed.

There's been lots happening and here's a few of the projects that I'm currently working on:

Making splints using the scraps of neoprene in our store room and inserting old spoons to act as a framework to set the wrist into a good position:





Making a stackload of worksheets that involve cutting, colouring, pasting and other general fine motor skills. This is me slightly extending my scope of practice where I've pushed at the boundary of being a Physio, stepped over the line into being an OT, ran a few more steps to the are titled: "teacher and curriculum development person". The children have a very limited amount of hands-on opportunities to cut, paste and interact with general classroom objects. Most lessons are spent being lectured by a teacher or copying off the blackboard. These ideas came to me when I was taking small groups for fine motor activities and then realised that I wasn't able to reach out to ALL the students who needed help. Then I realised that even some of the children in the Hearing Impaired department also needed opportunities for fine motor input to develop their language which then led to me taking classes to demonstrate to the teachers that interacting with paper, scissors, glue, peers and doing something other than copying off the board could actually have a myriad of learning opportunities, language development AND children with fine motor issues would get a chance at using their weak muscles during classroom activities. (Sorry, long sentence.) What was originaly basic therapy for the whole school has become a huge chunk of curriculum development.

So here's some beads made from brochures...



And some worksheets to learn about counting, houses, and shapes...

CULTURE 101

This is a short one. I'm going to state the facts and the events without opinion or persomal commentary. Make up your own mind about what happened on Friday:

Friday's structure at school is "extra-curricular" activities. In the morning, the children have their "culture" lesson. After recess, the children have clubs and after lunch, they have gardening and sports.

During culture, the school is separated into "Fijian" and "Indo-Fijian" groups. The children in the "Indo-Fijian" group are of mainly Indian-Fijian decent and those who are in the "Fijian" group are all the other children who are Indigenous Fijian, Rotuman, Chinese, a fruit-salad of culture, but NOT Indo-Fijian. Those in the "Fijian" group learn about Fijian culture and those in the "Indo-Fijian" group learn about Indian-Fijian culture. So far, there has been no integration or cross-cultural learning during culture lesson times.

Last Friday, the children in the "Fijian" culture group went on an excursion to the museum. Opportunities to go on excursions are limited and so when an outing is actually organised and there are funds to venture out of school, there is much excitement and buzz about the school with regards to the upcoming excursion. An excursion is a special event in these children's school lives.

The Indo-Fijian children stayed at school while the Fijian children were given the chance to go out on an excursion to the museum. No excursion has been organised for the Indo-Fijian children at school.

I have my opinions about this situation, but will keep them to myself this time.