Working with people with DisabilitiesFor 6 months in 2018-2019, I was been given the opportunity to work with someone who has been diagnosed with autism. They are someone who is non-verbal and walked into the school not knowing any sign language, and now he is walking out, using sign language whenever he can, including please, more, again, thank you, help, drink, eat and walking. I am very grateful that I was presented this opportunity because it is leading to a world beyond what I knew. This experience has got me to learn basic sign language skills, that I practice with them, as well as working on my patience.
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BIG BRothers big sisters mentoring program:
Skills:
I was genuine with him, I was willing to try new things, I gave him honest opinions and answers to his questions, I listened to everything he told me, and gave the appropriate answers to everything.
My role was to be there for him and to listen because from what I picked up from our conversations, he seemed to be going through the death of someone. His role was to be creative, and give ideas that we could later adapt and turn into something more exciting, than games that we were given. |
Overall Experience:We did anything and everything we could with the limited amount of supplies we had. Each week we'd meet up and we'd look at the open containers of things to do and the first craft we could see is what we did that week.
It was a lot of go with the flow type meetings but they were fun and it I would absolutely recommend mentoring to anyone because the experience is amazing. I feel like it impacted the both of us because we became close fairly quickly. It was because of all that we had in common and we always had something to talk about and we could always choose to do something that will enlighten both of us and were not doing it just for the other one. |