Our Approach
Parents’ counselling, guidance & training programme
This programme for parents is as important as that of training for children. Training at home, will facilitate the child to improve faster and build confidence in the child and parents as well.
Towards this goal, the centre has planned the following activities : –
- Three workshops in a year will be conducted to train the parents regarding special educational methods.
- Individual counseling and guidance to the parent as and when required.
- Meeting will be conducted once a year in each child’s home. Relatives of the child and neighbors can attend this meeting. This programme is very successful in changing the attitude of people around. It has helped to accept the child with a disability.
Celebration of festivals :
The centre celebrates national and religious festivals every year – eg. Independence Day, Deepavali, Gowri – Ganesha, Ugadi etc. These events are celebrated to expose the special children to various events like any other normal children. In addition, learning of various skills also takes place like cognition, speech-language, motor and social.
Special Events Celebrations :
- Teacher’s Day – 5th September
- Children’s Day – 14th November
- International Day of Persons with Disabilities – 3rd December
All these events are celebrated on a grand scale with full support from the parent group. They take a lot of interest in making the events look very colorful and also planned as an awareness program.
Human Resource Augmentation
Manonandana has been a resource centre for graduate and postgraduate students since the year 2000. The students undergoing courses in B.Ed., DMR, BA & MA (Psychology) BBM from Bengaluru City seek placement for their clinical work. Centre also received students from other Universities – DMS college, Ujire & Alvas college, Moodubidire.
Assessment Kit
An assessment kit has been developed to assess the developmental level in various areas like speech, language, cognition, motor, social, and self-help skills. This is based on clinical experience, detailed study of development in normal children, various tests available in Indian version etc. The whole procedure adopted in a battery of tests is ecology-based and is used at the centre.
The writing skills demands the acquisition of various concepts like direction, shape, size and mostly relationship between two characters, before starting the actual writing. This exercise is a very important step for all the children, particularly the special children.
The Manonandana team has developed 15 characters to develop pre-writing skills.
Modification of traditional games
Many existing games help the children to develop many skills, particularly the social skills. The Manonandana Team selected a few traditional games like Pagade, Alagulimane, Chowkabhara, ChinniDandu etc. to develop various skills. Modification of these games are made to meet the needs of the children, like big enough to handle the materials, easily visible and attractive with simpler rules.
Development of augmentative and alternative communication devices
There are some special children who are unable to develop oral speech. For such children there is a need to develop an alternative communication system. The centre has developed many such aids – picture, picture-word, word sentences board.These are low-cost electronic aids and can also be used effectively as augmentative systems.
