ECSE 421 RB4

This week I learned about the crisis cycle and eco maps and how I, as an individual and a future professional on these matters, will be able to help families in need.  Especially those families that have children or siblings with disabilities.  I enjoyed learning about the different stresses and strains a family can have and how I can help ease that stress, by looking from their point of view, getting to know their family, and helping identify those that are in their life that they can look to for help, both formally and informally.  I will be gone next week and so this week I really strived to be on top of everything and even a little ahead.  I really enjoyed doing this actually because it helped me understand the material better in class.  I want to continue to always try and be a little ahead in class because it helps a lot with remembering and understanding the content.  Taking notes in class helps me a lot to remember what is said the most as well.  As I learned the material this week, and as I strived to be a little ahead, I feel more confident than last week in applying what I learned to my future life.  As we did our eco maps with our peers I came to realize even more of how lucky and blessed I am to have a supportive and loving family.  The past few years’ things in my extended family have been a little more chaotic that before but they still would drop anything if I really needed their help!! I have family members that help me out financially and emotionally and it is a true blessing.  I enjoyed talking to my peers about our families and if there was ever something to go wrong or we needed help talking care of our children, who would be there for us! 

Weekly Quote: 

“Who they are and who they are to become actually has very little to do with what you expect from them. It has to do with who they are and how you guide them towards self-discovery.”  -Zita Dulock

HWD:

This week in class we started to talk about our family project and all that we need to do and to research to be able to help families out that have children with disabilities. One thing that was said in class was there are a lot of children in the world who are not diagnosed with a disability or are wrongly diagnosed with a disability.  This made me think a lot about the little boy I worked with in Romania and the different attributes that he had that seemed very similar to autistic behaviors.  Yet he was not diagnosed with having autism. The only thing that they had about him was that he was, in their words ‘severely handicapped’.  One of the things that I noticed about him was that he had bumps next to his ear (I remember learning about that in one of my class as how to identify certain disabilities), he only liked to eat his food if it was blended up and had bread broken up on the top of it (which made me think about sensitivity to textures), he loves to spin wheels on cars, and he loves to be hung upside down and swung back and forth.  As I continue to research about this topic I want to look into more of these behaviors and identify how many disabilities could come from, or include, one or all of those behaviors.  My source this week is Sister Swenson and what we talked about in class this week!