Summertime success

"Summer fun in Nürnberg"

Take a few minutes please to read this wonderful report of a successful and happy time:

 http://riddingfamily.blogspot.com/2011/08/conductive-education.html

Here are some brilliant descriptions of the activities experienced at a summer school where a family spent time with their child with spina bifida.

I really enjoyed reading it and I also enjoyed seeing my conductor friend at work in the pictures.

Thank's to the family for sharing it with everyone, it is a very valuable parental report on CE.

 

More on Spina Bifida

"On the Metro in Newcastle" by Susie Mallett
June 2011

In my email in-box last week spina bifida was mentioned again in relationship to conductive work.

There are already a few posting on my blog relating to spina bifida where I have described my own experiences and also referred to any related literature that I know of.

Today I have another book in my hand. one of its chapters is about Conductive Education and spina bifida. It could be of help to anyone starting out on this conductive path.

This book is: The Task Series in Conductive Education by Éva Beck, translated by Rátz katalin and published in English by MPANNI in 2010.

ISBN 978-963-87821-1-3

There is also an Hungarian version that was published in 2008.

It is available to purchase from the Petö Institute’s Mária Hári Library.

Notes

Susie Mallett, spina bifida -

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2009/11/new-blog-on-block.html

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2009/09/does-anybody-know-anything-about.html

Petö Institute’s Mária Hári library –

http://www.peto.hu/konyvtar/

Forging links across the Atlantic

"Oh, the big ship sails...", by Susie Mallett

Working alone

This subject comes up quite often amongst conductors. It is sometimes very hard to work in isolation. I have done it often over the years, though luckily at the moment I regularly have a real live conductor colleague, or even two. This makes life much happier for everyone, clients and conductors.

Thanks to technology I now have many conductor “colleagues” in Cyberspace, which adds to the contentment, giving us all the feeling of not really working alone. I even get to meet some of them personally, an added bonus.

Teamwork

Today there is something new to see from the Cyberspace Zusammenarbeit.

After all the recent blog postings about spina bifida, which ended up yesterday with Kasey Gray and myself landing on the same “Babycentre” website , we decided to take a bite of the carrot that Andrew was had dangled in front of us on his blog a few days ago. We set up a group:

http://groups.google.com/group/spina-bifida-and-conductive-education?hl=en

It is called "Spina bifida and Conductive Education" and its manifesto is:

This is a group for everybody who would like to see the benefits of Conductive Education extended and developed for children and adults with spina bifida, their families and their carers, wherever they may be.

Here you can share experience, ask questions, offer information and advice on CONDUCTIVE UPBRINGING at home and CONDUCTIVE PEDAGOGY however it might be applied.

The group welcomes the experiences and expertise of ANYONE who lives with spina bifida and everyone who wishes to help in a conductive manner.

Write in English, or in any language that you feel comfortable with.

Kasey explains how to join, on her blog.

http://american-conductor.blogspot.com/

I have borrowed her instructions to post here, as she is the technical expert in the team! I thank goodness for the younger ones amongst us. As one of the older ones, I have still managed to insert a direct link under "Conductive Groups" on the right-hand side of my blog. Once there follow Kasey’s instructions:

Anyone can join -- Go to the right side of the page and click "Join this Group" and you will be directed to create a Google account. You can use your current email address to join.

Anyone can post, after they have joined -- Click on "Discussions" then "+ new post". Or add your comments to an existing discussion.

Please join us, and tell us your experience of Spina Bifida and Conductive Education.

Just the right medicine

I have been ill-a-bed-and-wos-up for three days but now on the mend and back to work tomorrow. I was so happy to spend some of my getting-back-to-normal hours this afternoon setting up this group with Kasey.

Thank you, Kasey, for doing a lot of the hard work, it has been a real pleasure working with you. Isn't it wonderful that in Cyberspace we don’t need to get all those different coloured permits, visas and police checks to cross the Atlantic to work!

I look forward to seeing what happens in the new group. Perhaps it is the first of many such projects.

Spina bifida continued

Heiliggeistspittal from Museenbrucke, Nürnberg

It is amazing how just one Google Alert can take up so much time and provide so much information, and link up so many people who were just looking for the chance to be linked up.

I got a Google Alert today for this:

http://community.babycenter.com/post/a19665775/sort_of_weird_check_it_out?

It is a website "group" for parents of children born with spina bifida. They have realised they have been spotted.

After I had checked it out, I registered with ease and then, I hope, explained away the some of the weirdness for them, I linked up to a few of the other sites mentioned, to see what I could discover. I then returned to the original site where I discovered that Kasey Grey the “American conductor” had also been alerted to the Baby Centre site and and was offering the mums the benefit of her knowledge on spina bifida and provision of CE in the USA.

A small world!

Two conductors on one site in the space of a few minutes! I don’t know about the mums but Kasey and I were thrilled to meet each other there!

PS

Andrew Sutton has posted on his blog that he has noticed that there are a lot of dots on his map today from North America. I suspect that it could be that this group of mums from Baby Centre is checking out the weirdness of cyberspace.

American conductor -

http://american-conductor.blogspot.com/

Early conductive upbringing

"Post with pogácsas"

One Sunday in Moszkva Tér, Budapest 2003, by Susie Mallett

Spina bifida

I have found very little to read about spina bifida and Conductive Education, I believe that there is no longer a specialist spina bifida group at the Petö Institute and as far as I know it is the same at the Conductive Education Learning Centre in Grand Rapids, USA. I have been told, though, that there are mixed groups at both.

Please correct me if I am wrong and also please tell me whether there are other spina bifida groups anywhere in the conductive world.

As a student-conductor I worked in the spina bifida Kindergarten at the Petö Institute and it was a wonderful experience. I believe that the leader of this group is one of the conductors now training students in Grand Rapids. I learnt so much from her, for which I am now so very grateful.

Very few conductors have experience with children with this neurological disorder and I often get inquiries from students and young conductors asking where they can gather information and/or experience. I tell them all that I can and then refer them to the conductors in Grand Rapids and at the Petö Institute, and also to a book written by Dr Erika Medveczky: “Conductive Education as an educational method of neurorehabilitation.”

New blog on the block

Today I discovered this:

http://ourlittlegibblet.blogspot.com/2009/11/conductive-learning-center.html

It is a parents' blog, written mainly by the father, about life with their almost-two-year-old son Greyson who was born with a neural tube defect. Greyson attends the Conductive Education Learning Centre in Grand Rapids. It is worth taking a look.

I find the blog especially interesting because the child is beginning his conductive upbringing at such an early age.

This could turn out to be a very valuable addition to the conductive"literature", and I hope that we will all be able to learn something by following Greyson's progress.

Best wishes to the Gibb family, and thank you for this insight.

Notes

Conductive Education Learning Centre in Grand Rapids, USA -
http://www.aquinas.edu/clc/

Greyson and his parents’ blog -
http://ourlittlegibblet.blogspot.com/2009/11/conductive-learning-center.html

Previous spina bifida postings on my blog –
http://www.susie-mallett.org/search?q=spina+bifida

Dr Erika Medveczky-"Conductive Education as an educational method of neurorehabilitation", Budapest, 2006, ISBN963 229 819 5

Does anybody know anything about Conductive Education and spina bifida?

"September 21st 1978, somewhere near Bath, England", by Susie Mallett

This is the question that Andrew Sutton asked on “Conductive World” this week. Having read what he wrote I can provide a bit more information.

Petö began working with spina bifida in 1953.

I worked with spina bifida at the Petö Institute for a year. It was actually my first year, in 1989-1990, and I have occasionally had spina bifia children in groups here in Germany as well.

Having a spina bifida child in a group of children with cerebral palsy is no different to having a flaccid-toned cerebral-palsy child in a group, or having a MS client who has symptoms like paraplegia in a group where all the others have spastic symptoms. You can fit everyone into a group if you work out how.

Obviously there are different medical factors that have to be considered when working with children with spina bifida, just as there are with paraplegia and MS. But Conductive Education and spina bifida are no more to do with voluntary voiding of urine and learning to walk independently than Conductive Education with children with cerebral palsy has to do with learninng to walk and potty training.

Conductive Education as we know is about much more than this.

The children with spina bifida that have attended groups here in Germany over the years were using a catheter and the district nurse would visit the group several times during the day to assist the young children with this procedure. This would all be organised by the parents for the duration of the course.

At the Petö Institute today

Gill Maguire brought up the question, I think a while ago, of whether there is still spina bifida group in the Petö Institute.

When I was there in November last year I went to find out more about this. There was no one I knew there but I was told that the group is now a mixed cerebral-palsy and spina bifida group. The group leader of the old spina bifida group is still the leader of the mixed group but she was not was not there, as at that time she was in Grand Rapids. I was trying to find out more but Kasey has already confirmed on Andrew’s blog that this group leader taught her at Grand Rapids.

I would assume that the closure of the specialist spina bifida group is due to not having enough spina bifida children, It surely can not be that there are not enough specialist conductors to run it as this was one of the most popular groups to work in my days at the PAI.

The children

The spina bifida children who have been in our mixed groups here in Germany are more like the "Petö" child than are many of the children with cerebral palsy. Maybe this is to do with the “typical spina bifida personality“. They are so grown-up in some of their attitudes. As small children, they talk and talk and copy grown-ups' speech. They don’t only copy though. They learn very quickly to take responsibility for their own lives, perhaps because of the importance of learning to care for their own health from the beginning is instrumental in this.

Conductive Education is really suited to these personalities. This was so noticeable when I was in a group of twenty-five children as I was in the Petö Institute. Even at a time that I could still not understand much of what was being said, I could see the difference between these children and the ones with cerebral palsy, even in the Petö Institute where children with cerebral palsy were different to most I have seen in other countries. All so independent.

The spina bifida children did not have social problems to solve in the same way as the children with cerebral plsy. They somehow appeared more integrated, more adapted to their world. They were incredibly determined to get around for themselves, even if they could not walk. They responded to Conductive Education in the same way as athetoid children do: they loved the realisation that they can solve their own problems.

Some of them really did learn to walk without developing dreadful deformities. Others did not learn to walk but developed amazing determination.

Only this Tuesday I saw one of the children who used to come into our groups. She is now in Italy on holiday with a group from the charity I work with here in Nurnberg.

When she was younger she used to come to our groups regularly until she was about eight. Since then she has only goes on the “conductive” summer holidays. I would say that she is a “a typical Petö” thirteen-year-old.

Erika Medveczky's book

Anyone interested can read about spina bifida and Conductive Education in Dr Erika Medveczky's book "Conductive Education as an educational method of neurorehabilitation."

Dr Medveczky was the neurologist at the Petö Institute for about twenty years and was an ever-present figure in the spina bifida group when I worked there in 1989-1990. The data that she recorded in the second half of the above mentioned book were collected at the Petö Institute between 1987 and 2000.

Dr Medveczky has a longish section on spina bifida in her book. She says that there is now a reduced occurence in Hungary because of screening and multivitamin prevention based on folic acid. She has a lot to say about the tests done before children can begin the self voiding of urine, and the importance on this for longevity, as using catheters often causes infection.

I have enjoyed reading her book. It makes a change to read about Conductive Education with children other than those with cerebral palsy.

I hope that there are some conductors out there who work with spina bifida children, perhaps in Grand Rapids, who have more to tell us on this subject.

Reference

Andrew Sutton - Conductive Education and spina bifida, a failed promise, "Conductive World", September 4th, 2009

http://www.conductive-world.info/2009/09/spina-bifida-and-conductive-education.html

Erika Medvetczy - "Conductive Education as an educational method of neurorehabilitation", Budapest, 2006, ISBN963 229 819 5