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As a teacher of children with special needs in Australia, I sometimes get frustrated when I want to use a book the school doesn’t have or I find myself thinking "If I only had this and this toy / book / piece of equipment… I could teach this better" and so on. However, a recent trip to Malaysia showed me how lucky we are to have all the things that we do. |
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I was fortunate to be able to meet the staff and students at the local centre for kids with disabilities in Segamat, Malaysia – a smallish town about 2 hours from Kuala Lumpur – and what a fantastic experience it turned out to be. They wanted to meet me because I’m a qualified special education teacher and they were hoping I could give them ideas and so forth for the program they were establishing. In the 3 room bungalow they use as the site for their ‘school’, the staff do their best to teach the students basic skills and run programs as best they can. The staff are not teachers, but volunteers from the community, which only increased my admiration for them. When I met with them in October of 1997, the group of students with varying degrees of intellectual disability had built up to 19. The students attend the school from 8.30 - 12.30 each weekday. Back in Australia, I had purchased some educational games and toys for them - the kinds of things that we all find in our own classrooms, that I knew they did not have. Things such as wooden jigsaw puzzles, playdough, pattern blocks, picket blocks, a Chilean rainstick, bubble blowing mixture, a koosh ball (a must for every special needs room) and a neat little magnetic sculpture kit.
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