OUR HEARTS
Our Hearts are with the children of the In Step Children's Home and, especially those who are part of the Stepping Stones Care Program.
We want to introduce the Stepping Stones kids and one special little girl named Rael.
Meet Rael
She is a 9 year old girl who is both deaf and blind. She came to In Step when she was 6 and has been well cared for by the Stepping Stone aunties (caregivers).
God placed her story on our hearts to attempt to open her silent and dark world to the life around her. If you just click on the button below it will tell our journey of new discovery with her.
Stepping STONES KIDS
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ACC / PODD INTRODUCTION
Just as God placed Rael on our hearts, He placed the children who are severely disabled and require 24/7 care on our hearts, as well.
Most of these children cannot speak and have no means of communication. While at the beginning we had no real idea of how to help them, we were blessed to learn about Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).
This gave us hope that there may be a way to give these children a means to communicate for the first time in their lives. We have carried out our proposed experiment to demonstrate that our hope was more than just a hope. While our experiment goals were accomplished, the outcomes were less encouraging. With only 7 weeks to spend with the kids on our 2022-23 mission trip, only one of the three children showed promise of moving forward with the PODD Communication Program. Before we left In Step, we formed an ad hoc team of caregivers to continue the program work with the Stepping Stones kids. When we return in 2023-24, we hope to extend the work underway with those children identified as capable of learning the PODD Program. The learning of a "new" language is challenging even under normal circumstances. That is why we must let God lead us as we take the next steps with these kids.
Communication Is The Essence Of Human Life
The ability to communicate is fundamental to life. It is the person who cannot speak who often experiences the desperation of being regarded as a “no-body”, a person without needs and wants, rights and responsibilities.
Communication Is The Essence Of Human Life – the very foundation of living and learning in our homes, in our communities and in the workplace. And communication is also about power and control … and serves to express needs and wants, to ensure social closeness and facilitate the exchange of information.
Most importantly, the power in communication lies in being heard. This is the goal, to give the children a voice.
The PODD communication books will be the means by which we will introduce communication to these children.
As we have delved into the world of AAC, we have discovered a powerful program called PODD that has evolved over the past 30 years by Gayle Porter, a speech pathologist with the Cerebral Palsy Education Centre (CPEC) in Victoria, Australia.
PODD stands for:
• Pragmatic – the ways that we use language socially
• Organization – words and symbols arranged in a systematic way
• Dynamic Display – changing pages
PODD is a way of organizing whole-word and symbol vocabulary in a communication book or speech generating device to support expression and understanding of language for people with Complex Communication Needs (CCN).
PODD books come in many different formats to meet and grow with the communication needs of the child. We will begin with what are called "9 Early Functions" books and "12 Expanded Function" books with the Stepping Stones' kids. A photo of one of the 12 Expanded Function pages is included above.