Our gardening project expands

 

Conductive continuity
 
As always happens when I begin a project with my conductive groups our work expands and different aspects of living become part of the whole conductive experience. As we wait patiently for the garden to grow, the first tomatoes have set but are we are a long way off harvesting, and we have many associated jobs to do as the project evolves into sometime bigger and more encompassing.

One of these jobs is naming the plants. We are not going to be quite so strict as at the Chelsea Flower Show, where every plant on show in the separate exhibits has to be labelled, but it is important that the children and adults who use the garden learn to recognise what has been planted. 

Later during the cookery classes they will also learn how to use the produce in different recipes and they can go out to pick what they need just outside the door; therefore they need to be able to recognise it.

So as the project evolves reading and writing came to the fore this week, as the children have been painting the plant-names on signs that they made last week. Those who wished also drew their own image of the plant in question.

We want our raised bed to look in top form when we celebrate our twenty-year conductive anniversary next Sunday, we expect our visitors will wish to take a look at and admire our ever expanding plot! 

In the heat, as our thoughts turn to cooling water, we are already thinking about our next project which is to find half a wooden barrel to make into a small water garden, then after this we will turn our talents again to painting, decorating some wooden fruit boxes to plant-up and perhaps sell next year at the summer fete.

We have a busy week ahead of us, during which our gardening plans will evolve to incorporate even more live skills and experiences.

Our food programme

Fun while mixing fruit

I have just been listening to the Food Programme on BBC Radio 4, it was all about soup. It appears that soup has become trendy and the electric soup-maker is the new object to have standing on the kitchen worktop.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0520t3d

As far as I am concerned soup never went out of fashion. In my childhood scotch-broth, thick vegetable and minestrone were my soups of choice for grammar-school-days’ lunches, while my sister invariable took tomato. Mondays, after a Sunday chicken-dinner, were also soup days – Chicken soup with suet dumplings or Norfolk Swimmers, dumplings without suet.

As a vegetarian making veggie-soup became an art in itself especially when I was a art student in a house full of vegetarians. We would see who could make the biggest and tastiest pot-full that lasted the whole week! It was cheap. We always made homemade bread to go with it.

My Dad and I make soups too and using leeks from the garden with a potato to thicken it is the most popular one. My sister has one of the new soup-makers mentioned on Radio 4 so Dad and I can have a go with that when I am next home.

Conductive soups and milk-shakes

A few months ago we received a present of a soup-maker for use mainly in the Conductive Education afternoon group. Knowing that Évi and I do lots of cooking with the afternoon group (it was alphabet pancakes today) our Boss sent us a soup-maker that can also be used for milk-shakes!

The machine gets used for both soup and shakes, but the milk-shakes are the most popular. We receive a donation of fruit and veggies every Monday morning from a local supermarket and the children make a beeline for the fridge as soon as they arrive each lunch time to see what is available. They make their choice of the day, grab the machine and get working on their milk-shake dessert.

Chilli and chocolate preparations

There is often something to go with the milk-shake and this time it was blue waffles!

We have decided to make a cookery book as there have been so many weird and wonderful creations – my favourite being the carrot and banana, and the chilli-chocolate.

'Let me show you how to do it!'

 

This time it was fruit pizzas with paprika,carrot and banana shake!

It was a delight to watch as one child, who did not know how to use the machine, was taught by a child who has made a new flavour milk-shake every week for months, a child who has athetoid cerebral palsy and has very severe difficulties with her speech. It was amazing how they managed, but they did and without any help from me. Just my smiles of praise and approval!

What I find amazing and love to be a part of is when we place ingredients on the table that we know sort of go together and then let the children take their pick and concoct a soup.

Each creation will taste great but will all be very different.

The ingredients that go in to each soup can often depend on the nationality of the cook or sometime  just on what they are used to eating at home – paprika goes in the Hungarian girl’s soup and celery root and parsley in the German’s.

Tasting each other’s soup and giving advice on what to add is an important part of the cooking process, then all the soups get eaten with great relish and they nearly always taste delicious.

Our group of cooks has decided that homemade food, especially their very own homemade food, tastes best because it is full of tender loving care and only contains those ingredients that they like to eat.

Of course we are teaching our teenagers how to fend for themselves in the future but as far as they are concerned they are just having lots of fun and drinking lots of weird and wonderful milk shakes!

Fruit Pizza with paprika/carrot or strawberry/choco milk-shake

PS

The cookery book should be out for Christmas 2015! These are the authors at work -

 

 

The wanderer returns

The return of summer by Susie Mallett, 2011

It was a really good feeling that I had, as I was “writing” this posting on my bike on the way home this evening and realised that I had actually written it several times before. I do not of course mean that I have been publishing the same posting over and over again all these years but that I have told a similar story quite a few times in several different ways.

This is a story of clients’ returning to work with me after a break, usually teenagers or young adults looking for something that they remember from their childhood and want back in their lives. They are often looking for something that they remember as being motivating, and something that made them more active and more able to take part more in all aspects of their chosen life.

The wanderer returns is an apt title, even though the young client who is with me this week has not actually returned for good. He still lives away from home in order to attend his chosen school, but I do expect that we shall see more of him over the next few years.

Our Harry…

Fifteen years ago this little boy was, I suppose, our own little Harry Potter, at a time before anyone in Germany had heard of the real Harry P. Our Harry was really bright and always full of fun, telling jokes and having us in stitches, and he could then, and still can, talk the hind leg off a donkey!

One day all those years ago when he would not stop talking my colleague, who Our Harry told me today was always his favourite conductor, opened the window and asked the dustmen to come over and take him with them. I can still hear his giggles when they obliged (well not really, they did not take him away but they showed willing by bringing the dustbin right up to the window!)

I discovered today that Our Harry was not even born when I arrived in Germany in 1993. In 1996, soon after conductive work began in Nürnberg, Our Harry was two years old and was one of the first littlies who attended the early sessions with their parents. This was run by a colleague who was running the same kind of group here this very morning. He then went on to the Kindergarten group at the local school, run by my colleague, Our Harry’s favourite conductor, who is now in our integrated kindergarten group, then later as an eight-year-old he was in the after school-group that I myself had worked in for many years.

At ten years old this lad made the decision, of course together with his family, that he would leave home, go to boarding-school some two-hundred miles away, so that he could attend a school where he could take O- and A-level equivalents. He is still living away from home, is very successful at school, and hoping that he will make the grade that will take him off to study at university in Berlin in two years’ time. As I said, the wanderer has not returned for long.

…and his conductors

I realised today how lucky our old clients are because, when they decide that they want to return to conduction after a while, for whatever reasons, they are welcomed back by familiar faces. In the case of Our Harry there were three familiar faces today. All three of the conductors who worked with Our Harry, during all three of the phases described above, where actually there at work today, (and that, during the first week of the school holidays, is quite a feat!)

Our Harry and I are working alone but as the Kindergarten children are going off slowly one-by-one on their hols, my conductor-colleague was able to come across to help me today and offer us some very valuable advice, and of course to reminisce by recounting funny stories and chatting for long enough for our Harry to remark:  “She is cool!”  

Despite my grey hair he also told me that he finds me cool… “but crazy, too”.

Later Our Harry remarked that he thought that I have a lot of respect for the colleague who helped us. He is right I have and I asked him how he knew. He said he knew because he could hear it in my voice. 

That is really good observation for this sensitive soul, a seventeen-year-old young boy who likes techno-music, discoing, computer wrestling, and watching the Klub, Nürnberg FC, play football every home game. He also loves communicating with people.

Why the return 

Our Harry had phoned me a while back, to ask whether there would be any possibility of working with us over the summer holidays. He told me that his legs had been operated on recently and that he felt in need of some conductive input during his long holiday to get him moving again. It is very difficult for him during school time to find enough time for rehabilitation. We have got a week together now and perhaps there will also be time for a few sessions later on in his summer break.

Our Harry had first decided on working a very long, six-hour-day with me. This we reduced almost immediately to five as we soon realised that after six hours there would be no energy left for him to get himself home! Probably not for me either.

We are both very happy with the work that we have done so far. We have achieved quite a lot already in the short time that we have had together. Standing with his own muscle power and sitting somewhere other than in his wheelchair where goals that we have achieved after just two days and will now be improved upon and added to over the next few days. 

English pluperfect and English breakfast 

(Both conductive)

Our activities have also included cooking lunch together and sorting out the English pluperfect tense, with thanks to my wonderful book The Queen’s English. Tomorrow we will be looking at subordinate clauses and the Oxford comma, while we cook a typical English breakfast of egg, bacon, sausages, fried bread, tomatoes and mushrooms, and what he calls “black tea”.

Long-term conducting

I will probably need to write another separate posting at some time in the future to expand on the subject and to collect my thoughts together on long-term conducting. 

I have been so lucky to have accompanied so many of my clients in their conductive upbringing right through to young adulthood, observed and assisted as they have grown up in a conductive family and then have gone on to live conductively as young adults. 

Not only do I work with clients, young and old, over many years, I also meet and re-meet teachers, and physiotherapists, grandmothers and sisters, swimming teachers and riding instructors, and of course mums and dads. There are also other conductors and conductive centres where I have worked that have also helped to create this growing network of people. 

These are all people who I have come in contact with again and again, some more often than others, but all holding a valuable spot in this mass of information that seems to have recently drawn together, without me really noticing how it has grown over the years. It is like a spiders web full of information and connections to use in my work. 

This network expands from Nürnberg to all over Bavaria, then throughout Germany and out in to the big wide conductive world. It is like a fragile, interconnected mesh of spiders’ webs, or perhaps like one of those spiralling tunnel-webs that seems to have no end. With very delicate threads that can easily break but when brought together are tough enough to provide strength and stability to our work.

Notes

The Queen’s English by Bernard Lamb -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_English_Society

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/god-save-the-queens-english-our-language-is-under-threat-from-ignorance-inverted-snobbery-and-deliberate-dumbing-down-2099825.html

Being brave

"Helping the Easter Bunny"

Several years ago my colleague said to me: “My, you are brave”

When I asked her what she meant she explained that it was because I had left the child that I was working with standing up at the wall-bars while I went off to fetch something that we needed. I was talking to the child all the time, reminding her that she was looking after herself until I got back to her, something that I had learnt from her Mum when we had worked together in the mother-and-child group. At that time she was learning to sit at a plinth, holding on to two rings. I told my colleague that it was not I who was being brave now, or the mother a few years before, it was this little girl.

This Littlie, with athetoid cerebral palsy, now quite a biggie at eight years old next week, stands up from the floor when I am not even looking or expecting her to do so. She then turns herself around, stands between two sets of wall-bars and waits for the action!

There is just enough space between these bars for me to squeeze into and if I am not standing there Littlie uses the space for a multitude of purposes.

She uses this safe space to stand up in when she wants to do many things: play football-skittles, to cook with a table pushed up to her, to play hoop-la, to put on her shoes, as a starting point to practice stepping or just to observe the world. When the helicopter landed on our field last week she struck a similar pose in the fork of a tree trunk!

I had not realized that the wall-bar-space was the facilitation for learning to lean on a tree to watch a helicopter take off, but I know now.

Anyone for tennis?

Yesterday this little girl decided that she would like to play tennis while standing in what has become her special space.

Holding on to the lightweight tennis-racket means using two hands and this then left no hands to hold on to the bars. Now this Littlie can stand for up to a whole half-minute on her own, standing free in the middle of a room, and she can stand in her space between the wall-bars for a long time if she is not using her hands. But to play tennis she has to have a bit of a safety-net, just as she does when she stands there to cook (the table). What kind of safety-net, could we use to play tennis? A stool or a table would get in the way. I could not be the safety-net as she soon realized, because she needed someone to throw the balls to her.

My little client was just about a second ahead of me in solving this problem. The solution, she said, was that I would have to tie a rope in front of her between the two sets of wall-bars. This would prevent her falling forwards, something that in the end she did not do because she had a safety-net!

With the rope tied in place and the tennis racket tight in two hands the game began. I was the feeder of a stream of soft tennis-ball that she sent flying all over the room. Sometimes she hit with such a force that I told her that her brother and father, who are both avid players, had better watch out, there is competition about! This raised a smile!

Fresh and fit for fun and games and learning, and cool with it

It is the middle of the school holiday but this littlie took up the offer of coming as usual to her afternoon group. She was alone, which she says she enjoys because she learns so much so quickly. She was also really fit this week, with no early start like on school days and no home work either.

She is right. She really does learn a lot when she comes in the holidays on her own. And she did come on her own, cycling right into the room yesterday, looking cool in pink sunglasses, shouting: “Hi I am here!” I still cannot quite believe it, that I have a child of seven, going on eight next week, attending the centre who arrives all on her own.

Taking over the lead

Today, after holding the tennis racket in both hands became a bit too much like hard work, she freed the ropes and told me that if I tie her up (this was her own solution to the problem, remember, not mine) then she was going to tie me up too. And this is just what she proceeded to do.

Practicing knots like the girl-guides do

Reef knots and two round turns and two half hitches!

Proper knots were tied around both my arms and my feet and the ropes were then tied on to the wall-bars! Then I was given three tasks to complete before she would let me go. I had to move a ball with my toes and try to knock the skittles over. I managed it after about ten attempts. Littlie had to do a lot of retrieving of balls and she managed to stand the skittles up, with her shaky body doing its utmost to prevent her from succeeding. I then had to throw a ball against the tennis racket that she had tied to the wall-bars, with a little bit of help from me despite the ropes and knots, so that the balls ricocheted into a basket. This took about fifteen attempts as it was extremely difficult to do with my arms tied to the wall. I got the last ball in the target! By the time that was finished with this task there were brightly coloured balls all over the room, it looked as if the Easter Rabbit had been there hiding his eggs.

Important jobs before Easter

Finally I had to do a puzzle, moving a shape in a track using my feet. When this was completed I was freed. With the knots all untied we were able to get on with some important work. First to try out the newly adjusted old, just about worn-out and getting too small rolator, so it can be used at home during the holidays. Then we had to test drive the bike that we have on trial, in order to discover which cycle will be more suitable for the next size up, one with three wheels or a two wheeler with stabilizers. No need to have three guesses as to which one this big girl has set her mind on.

And finally off to the swing

Yesterday this little girl had discovered that she can use the swing that has no back rest and that she can swing herself on it. She realized that she could walk backwards while sitting on the swing and make herself take-off.

After this discovery we learnt how to step backwards, stretching her legs one at a time. She learnt to stand still for a second to balance and then let go, so that she could go whizzing through the air. She can do the leg movements to keep the swinging movement going. This she learnt while still in the Kindergarten, using a swing with back rest and straps like the one that she has at home. Now she holds on tight to the ropes and swings to her heart’s content, with the wind on her back and on her front and in her hair!

I had not realized yesterday that this was such a special treat and achievement and thrill for this child. She did it as if it was everyday occurrence. She walked over to the swing with the rolator that she had borrowed (that is another story) and asked for my help. The swing is in the Kindergarten playground that is usually closed by the time Littlie is outside. It is holiday, as I said, and she was here earlier so could enjoy the garden and its Ikarus swing with wings.

Today she told me that the only thing that she had told her Mum about our work together was the swing and she wanted to try it again today. The increasing number of steps that she is taking on her own were not the hit yesterday, it was the swing. It is as if this little girl just takes it for granted that one day she will walk on her own, but she is not so sure that she will play all the games that her brother and friends play. So she is determined to give them all a go while she has me there to help her. And what better opportunity is there than in the holidays when the Kindergarten is open and the swing there for the use of.

I have sent a picture of said swing home with little girl, with the gorgeous spring weather and a birthday coming up it may be just the job for a present from someone. The swing it is made of cloth and padded a bit so does not slip from beneath her like a plastic one would, instead it moulds itself around her body as she grasps it tightly to her by the ropes. It is just perfect for this wobbly little girl who wants to give everything a go.

PS

The rolator and the eggs

First the story of the eggs

Last week we were really busy. It was the last days of school before the Easter Break and some children were to go off on holiday with their families for two weeks. We realized that we must help the Easter Rabbit to prepare for Easter, otherwise we would not be ready in time.

The last thirty minutes is usually crafty time but we changed it to after dinner so that paint was dry to take home. We were soon very busy painting salt-dough eggs and chickens that we were hoping to sell, with the Easter Bunny’s help. We wanted to raise money for one of the Association’s horses that has recently had an operation on a tumour. He has a huge hospital bill to pay. Our children usually ride this horse and it was their idea to help him out with a donation. We know now that we got at least sixty Euros for our craftwork perhaps more.

Blow

As they were busy painting and threading chicks and eggs on to ribbons our friend Évi was at the other end of the table blowing real eggs.

Now this was really much more exciting than painting salt-dough chicks and all children joined together in a chorus to say “I want to do that” , but loudest of all was our little athetoid girl.

So do it they did. What could Évi and I do as we saw them all throw down their paint-brushes and wait. We solved a few problems in record time and the children set to it. There was only one broken egg from a dozen and that was one of Évi's!

It was quite a challenge working out how make holes in eggs without breaking them, to blow eggs without breaking them and then to get the already limited amount of puff all going into the hole. But we are a great team and what Évi and I do not solve the children do.

The children with diplegia held the eggs themselves and were able to rub them on sand-paper to make the hole. They were also able to blow in the hole, but even for them it was strenuous and they too took to the method that we had devised for the athetoid girl. I held her egg and she puffed down a straw with all her might that I held in place in the hole. It worked. By the fifth egg she managed to get the yolk out too. And afterwards she realized that she could now blow bubbles in her drink!

Scramble

With all the eggs empty ready to rinse out and dry before painting there was a bowl full of white and yolks in front of them. They asked what would happen to it and Évi and I looked at each other wondering who was going to bake cakes all evening or make piles of pancakes. The children quickly decided that they should make scrambled eggs and then eat it. Évi and I looked at each other as if to say that puts all our plans out of the window.

The standing programme now got transferred to the kitchen scrambling eggs and the walking programme to the table, setting it for our snack. One of the children said that this was the best scrambled egg ever, better than his Mum’s even, because he had made it himself. I tried it and he was right it was delicious.

At the end of the day I asked the children what had happened in the last few days to make them all so good. Were there teachers sprinkling them with magic dust? Was it the spring weather and the birdsong that was making them grow and achieve such tremendous things, like walking alone for a few steps more each day or having enough puff to blow an egg?

Another year older

Most of them did not know the reasons but our little girl told me it was because it would soon be her birthday.

In a way she is right because she is looking forward to it so much, her soul is happy. She is really looking forward having her friends with her at a party on a farm where she can climb over the bales of hay, beside them without any fear of hurting herself.

She is also right because she has grown. A year has passed and she now realizes that what I always tell her is true. That is that she will find everything a lot easier when she is bigger. She can reach handles and step higher and grasp better with bigger hands. She will get stronger and her body will learn to do what she wants. And it is just so and she finds it all great and wants to try more new and exciting activities as the world of bigger people opens up to her. Just like in the story of the swing.

Now the story of the rolator

This little girl’s rolator really is a bit small and is ready to be replaced with the next size up. The man who fixes all of this for us said he would come over to sort it out before the holidays and the birthday. On the day before he came the child was out in the garden using it when I saw her approach another child in the Kindergarten group who has a bigger rolator and asked whether she could borrow his. He was sitting at a table at the time, eating a snack. He gave his permission, without really realizing what he had done, and off she went, travelling much faster than before, as the wheels were set differently.

Now Évi and I had not realized that this was why the little girl had wanted to swap, but she had used this rolator before and she knew! The boy who gave it to her was none too pleased. He wanted to go to the sandpit and he realized that when using the rolator that he was left with he had to walk on his own two feet, and not glide over there on his arms after giving one big push as he had been able to do before.

Our man-who-sorts-it-all did a really good job for us today. He fiddled with a couple of screws and made one rolator go faster and the other slower. Both children are walking tall now using their own rolators again. One of them is not too happy about the change because it takes him a bit longer to get from A to B but he will soon get used to it and he will get stronger too. He may also stay in one place long enough to talk to the other children and get invited to hop on to the back of a bike.

Notes

Haba Ikarus swing-

Haba airplane-swing -

http://www.blueberryforest.com/haba_toys/haba-toys-airplane-swing.htm