glare weather friends

It comes so naturally.

No grown-ups required.

Kids get it, friends get it.

On a sunny morning, waiting for the ANZAC Day march to set off, you need nothing more than your ‘glare weather friends’.

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

Shot 1: Image of Mac and his peers facing into the sun. Mac’s eyes closed from the glare.

Shot 2: a friend holding her hand up to provide shade for Mac’s eyes.

when stuff just happens…

go away…

It was lunch time and Mac, having just finished eating, was heading out to the playground.

“Go away,” they said, as Miss M and Mac approached the group of boys.

For a moment, Miss M was worried – these were Mac’s fellow Grade 6 boys.

“Buuuttt,” she started, about to say ‘It’s Mac’ when they quickly clarified.

“Oh, not Mac, he’s with us, we just don’t need you.”

“Fine,” she said, feigning indignation, but secretly thrilled at their autonomy and independence.  Clearly no adults and certainly no ‘female adults’ are needed in their midst.

I was relieved to hear it.  Mac was a little upset on the second day of sixth grade, thinking he wouldn’t have any friends in his class and what that might mean.  This year is a big change for him –  it’s his first new teacher in three years.

He knew he wasn’t going to get in the same class as one of his best mates. They completely outwit/outplay/outmaneuver the teachers and don’t do any work at all… all the while looking “very busy”.  He was ok with that, he said.  But for some reason he thought all the other kids were allowed to pick a friend and he wasn’t.  I don’t think that was the case, and after actually getting his class placement, he realised he has some great kids in there and he is much happier.

It’s hard to balance the “sticking with who you know” approach in class friendships or embracing the “new kids mean new opportunities”.  Every year I have a moment of a panic – worried that he might not maintain those relationships he formed in the prior year… so far, that has been misdirected worry.

It was great to hear Miss M report back that, on the first morning after being placed in their classes, lots of the kids said: “Right, when do we get to learn how to work with Mac.” Learning about Mac’s technology, working with him is still a revered role.  If he stuck with the same kids all the time, those new kids would miss out and so would he… you just never know what allies are around the corner.

So the first week of Grade Six has been OK, here’s to a wonderful final year of primary school.

todos com todos

everyone with everybody…

A fantastic documentary about the inclusion of children with disability in mainstream schools in São Paulo, Brazil.

While almost the entire doco was “quote worthy” I particularly like the simplicity of this translated statement by Samuel’s father…

 

“I don’t see any other model.

In the segregation model people with disability don’t learn their autonomy and people without don’t learn to deal with the difference”.
Samu’s Dad

 

This movie is part of the Why Heloisa Project www.porqueheloisa.com.br
I think I will be spending some time clicking around in that project/website in the coming days.

For our English language blind viewers I have requested an English translation… will post it here if I can get my hands on it.

todos com todos…

 

 

swim like you’ve never swum before …

School’s in for 2014 which means swimming carnivals are on the agenda across the district.

As per last year, I braved the pool to help Mac with his “Macstroke” races, so he could get some points for his sports house.  Together we swam the 11-year-boys breaststroke, backstroke & freestyle events…

then this happened!

Two of his mates decided they wanted to swim with him in the last race of the day and negotiated with me to resign my position on Team Mac.  With Mac now in 5th grade, I am guessing there’s a very good chance I won’t get a ‘look in’ next year, if today’s success is any indication.

There was also significant desire from Mac’s sports house Captain to include him in the relays, but with a few too many kids making themselves available we opted for the free swim at the end of the day. After all, he’d already competed in every other event possible.

What a wonderful day, what a wonderful sight to watch Mac and his two mates compete as a team.

Who’d want it any other way?

 

the problem with scare campaigns…

As the month of AAC Awareness (augmentative and alternative communication) draws to a close I was struck by the amount of times the QUIT Victoria ad from 2007 “Voice Within” has been running on TV.

Here’s the link:  http://www.quit.org.au/media/?id=28073

It frustrates me that we are constantly bombarded by the insidious messaging prominent in this ad, that, if you can’t speak you can’t communicate – something AAC acceptance is constantly up against.

And… not withstanding, that once again “walking” is put out as the great ‘hope’ not “communication” (ugh).

I accept this ad is important in the context of “quitting smoking” but concede it is quite damaging to the ongoing awareness and acceptance of AAC – it’s pretty offensive.

This maybe have been something addressed (by AAC users and professionals) when it first aired back in 2007 but the reappearance of it during my TV watching was just a little jarring – particularly so when Mac is often watching when these ads come on.

I discuss with him why people choose to use that type of fear based portrayal and why it is so wrong.  We lump those people, the “fear mongers” into the same basket as the “pity peddlers” and the “disability charity merchants”… there is no place for them in our world.

you know your commitment to inclusion has been worth it when…

Today, on arriving at school I found out Mac’s aide would be arriving a bit late.  Mac also had a fill in teacher (but one who has been around the school a fair bit).

What I LOVE…
there was NO suggestion I needed to hang around until the aide arrived.

And better still…
when I offered to hang around they reconfirmed that it was ‘totally unnecessary’ so I happily went on my way.  Mac just settled in for roll call with the rest of the class while a couple of kids busied themselves setting up his gear ready to start work.

One of Mac’s IEP goals has always been ‘to become an independent learner with the long term goal of aide support needed only for personal care and not for meeting his education needs’.

It’s one of Mac’s more powerful IEP goals for a number of reasons:

• It sends a message to Mac that he has a role to play in his own learning and removes the suggestion he “needs an aide” from his world.
• It shows we have confidence in, and high expectations for, Mac.
• It helps ensure the teacher takes greater responsibility for Mac’s learning.
• It provides room for Mac’s peers to really learn how to work with, and advocate for, Mac in the absence of another adult (aide).
• It allows the aide confidence to constantly strive to become redundant in their role or, at the very least, invisible in their role.
• And it removes any possibility that threats around ‘withdrawing or reducing aide support’ can be used as a  power play by Principals or education departments.   If that is ever suggested you can simply say “fantastic, a step closer to our IEP goal, what a great opportunity!  What will we need to adjust in the classroom to allow this to work well for the teacher and students?”

A typical school day for Mac has a period of half an hour where where no aide is in the classroom.  During the lunch time period the aide was helping develop and facilitate more inclusive opportunities for Mac which has proven successful and has allowed her to now assist other students who actually need more help with the chaos of the playground instead.

So Mac is on his way in meeting that long term IEP goal… days like today only confirm this.

fridge magnet friday…

I often hear parents of children with disabilities voice concern over people staring at their kids… but is the alternative better?

Louis Lim’s powerful observation makes me absolutely sure I will continue to embrace any prolonged gazes cast towards Mac.   I don’t ever want him to be invisible to his community, invisible to our society or to be “eliminated from our consciousness”.

So I guess I offer a word of caution to those who have difficulty accepting the ‘stare’. “Be careful what you wish for”, there might just be way more at stake if a stare, a sidewards glance, a gawk  or an outright ‘gape’ is eliminated – invisibility is a poor alternative.

Check under the fridge for more information on Louis Lim…

mac = albert

Book Week 2013 and the focus is on space.  I gave Mac a few options for his book week character based on things we already had ‘laying around’ the place.

To his credit he picked the more obscure option – but potentially easiest for me – in Albert Einstein.

He owns a cool Einstein tee-shirt courtesy of a recent trip to the Griffith Observatory, regularly gets around in some star pattern pants when not in his school uniform and he was pretty certain that had red converse hi-tops been around when Einstein was a kid… that’s what he would have worn.

Add some silver and white hair spray, a fake moustache and brows and, there you have it, Mac = Albert (yep, that is all Mac’s own hair).

I particularly loved watching the kids find out who Mac ‘came as’ then, share that with other kids as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, busily telling anyone who would listen “look, Mac came as Albert Einstein” or “did you see Mac? He’s Albert Einstein”.

I did buy Mac this book from the “I Am” series which we will read in the coming days on the Kindle App on the iPad.

I realised I had some of my own space/time continuum  failings as I tried to remember what Mac had done for book week each year since Kindergarten.  Thanks to some past blog posts & a Facebook post I was able to look back and see just what we actually did in those prior years.

CLICK THE ICONS TO CHECK OUT THE GHOSTS OF BOOK WEEKS PAST…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the society I see… is the society for me!

I watch one of Mac’s classmates, “C” scurry back into the room after the bell had gone.

“Have you got one of those wheelchair sheets?” he asked the teacher, “I’m taking one home for my Dad.”

‘What’s a wheelchair sheet?’ you ask …

Well, it seems the kids are working on inventions and mods for Mac’s wheelchair at the moment, some work is going on in class… others are taking it home to keep working on.  But “C” decided his Dad will probably have some good ideas on how to make Mac’s chair work for soccer… C’s dad also uses a wheelchair.

I had a good chuckle with C’s mum about the fact her husband is now getting homework.

But… let’s just think about what is going on here.

Mac’s peers and Mac are designing wheelchair modifications and activities to make it possible for Mac to do more stuff WITH THEM.

I’ve seen a couple of the blueprints.

There’s a multi-net cricket catching contraption, a catapult style bowling attachment (yay for the girls for finally coming up with a catapult) and one of the boys is working on how to attach the class carpet sweeper to Mac’s chair, so he can help out with class chores.

Part of this ties in to their “Awesome in August” class challenge, but much of this innovative thinking has followed some of the other kids designing a way for Mac to play handball with them in the playground.

The handball idea was the kids’ initiative.  They do seek out our assistance (but generally only when they need me to buy something LOL).

This is our future generation, this is the society we get to look forward to.  A society where where inclusion and innovation reign supreme.

So why would anyone want less than this for their kids?

Why do people choose segregated schools, segregated classrooms or segregated activities?  Why don’t they want what is on offer in a place where “all means all”, where disability “value adds” and where innovation, problem solving and broader thinking is the norm?

I can see the society I want my son to grow up in, and I look forward to it.  I’m not convinced that the other choices don’t actually weaken a society.

the footy draft and the kid who was ‘second pick’…

 

I know there are people who wonder why some of us fight so hard for the philosophy of inclusion to simply be the norm.

Today was a reminder of why we do what we do.  The concept of inclusion isn’t really about Mac, it’s not about me, or us as a family…   it’s for all of us, our entire community, our entire society.  It makes us all better people.

According to Mac’s teacher, this is how things went down today…

Friday is sports day and today’s activity was touch footy (touch football/AusTag/flag football/toque de futebol).

Under Mr B’s guidance the team captains get four picks each – then Mr B divvies up the rest to avoid someone being the potential ‘last pick’.

Mr B was absolutely amazed when Mac was the second pick on one of the teams.  He said, “it wasn’t something I expected – but it was awesome to witness”.

It is these little moments that make you realise what great young people we are growing by ensuring they are ALL together, authentically together.  Not as part of a program, or a unit or by special invitation for part of a day, or for certain subjects or by volunteering to be with the ‘special kids’ as a rostered job.

To these kids Mac is just one of them.  Sure, they know he has a disability… they just don’t care.

For the record… Mr B & I both acknowledged we may not have picked Mac if we were captains.  He kind of sucks at touch footy and we are both, clearly, a little bit too competitive and perhaps not as ‘evolved’ as these kids…

As it turned out he played briefly then switched it up to become a touch judge/linesman.

To be honest, I’m not sure what is funnier – Mac playing touch footy in the chariot or Mac being a linesman (bearing in mind his vision impairment).  I guess touch footy at CPS just became a ‘game of chance’.

book week, kurt fearnley and those “guns”…

Book Week 2012 is here.  School has once again gone with a theme… this year “Come as a Champion”.    While I admit,  my book week purist heart would like a straight ‘book character’ theme one of these years, it didn’t deter us from helping Mac find his perfect ‘champion character’.

In a nice stroke of serendipity the Paralympics are also on.  This has created much discussion at school about what event Mac might be able to compete in when he’s old enough.  The suggestion that maybe “sport isn’t his thing” hasn’t really been readily accepted… we’re still working on an acceptable answer. 😉

After throwing up a few options Mac settled on Kurt Fearnley.  For our non-Aussie readers – Kurt is one of THE legends of wheelchair racing and fits the ‘champion’ requirement perfectly.

In another twist the kids have been studying ‘simple machines’ in Science.  I offered Mac the opportunity of ‘bulking up his guns (arms)’ with a bit of “engineering” while sneakily providing some congruency to their recent learning… all in the guise of “dress ups”.  Mac was hooked… we were sorted.

NB: check your volume settings – there is some ‘muzak’ that hopefully won’t blow your ears out.

When it came to the crunch I probably should have sat in on a couple of their classes as my fading knowledge of fulcrums and pivots started making my head hurt.  Thankfully my Dad was a willing  assistant… although his full mechanical spring action metal arm system was soon discarded when I was able to prove my much simpler method would actually suffice.

Mac took the iPhone on stage and one of his classmates pressed the right button in Proloquo2Go for him so he could announce who he was (just as the other kids do).  It was nice to see the young kids at school get exposed to the idea of AAC and Mac’s method of speaking  (it was pretty cute that he got extra applause after he spoke – we really do have a great group of kids at our school).

Here’s some extra pics of the ‘wheelchair racer dude’ in all his glory.

liver la vida

It’s hard to know how much involvement to have in assignments when your child has no chance of doing it on their own.

A lot of the assignments to date have been more about me teaching Mac the concept of choosing topics, researching and then deciding what to include – I guess this is probably much the same for everyone.

That being said… I wasn’t overly thrilled when he brought home the requirements for his assignment on “organs”.  He had been assigned “the liver” and was to present to the class as if he was ‘the teacher’.

Ugh, the liver, I thought.  How are we going to find age appropriate stuff and avoid the obvious drug, sexually transmitted disease and alcohol damage issues that seem to feature ‘way more prominently’ on the internet than any other.

With some focussed searching we did OK.   We watched some cool videos, found some good websites.  Mac had to decide what he wanted to include in his assignment.  I showed him how to change up the information so it sounded like something he might say.

We decided to go with a Powerpoint presentation so he could progress it with his switches while ‘taking the class’.

We created his own avatar using the WeeMee Avatar Creator app (we like it because it has a wheelchair accessory).

We popped his Avatar into his CrazyTalk 2D animation software so it could speak with his dialogue.

We decided to use the Acapela-Box to download the voice.  We had to pay for some credits to use this despite having his Dynavox.  Thing is the Dynavox doesn’t really ‘hold its own’ for long tracts of speech.  It gets crackly and breaks up a bit too much for our liking.  With Acapela Box we can use the same voice he uses on his Dynavox but with greater clarity and no chance of it failing mid-sentence.

I poked around on the internet and found some pictures, bought some stock images to include and created some of my own elements.  I discussed with Mac what his images might look like, what we could include and importantly made him choose the ‘liver’ image he liked the best.  From memory… I think he over-ruled my first choice for making “liver dude”

Here’s the video version of his Powerpoint presentation
(you’ll need your sound turned on & be sure to read on after you’ve watched it).

THE LIVER by Mac Burns

Did you learn anything new?

Oh, and for those super-observant folk…
Disclaimer: no M&Ms were harmed in the making of this assignment… but, that’s not to say a few weren’t hacked 😉  

vale Mrs Young…

The irony of her name is not lost on us as we mourn the loss of a teacher at our school this week.

Too soon, too sudden and too young…  Road fatalities pay no heed to how much you are loved, needed or revered.

Anne was one of the best, one of the teachers who truly ‘get it’ and she was absolutely one of a kind.

Irreplaceable? Yes.

Leaving a legacy she can be proud of? Absolutely!

fridge magnet friday

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