LEARNING OUTCOME
Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
I chose to join Yoga Therapy with Tampines MINDS is firstly because I want to keep myself doing a sport that I was good at a long time ago, which helps with flexibility and relaxation. I realised there is a deeper significance when I searched up what Tampines MINDS is about. I can help people with disabilities to calm down and relax while I’m doing yoga myself. win-win.
For the past two weeks we talked about the importance of yoga to us, CAS aims, the benefits and drawbacks of yoga, how can yoga help people with autism and down syndrome.
September
- Challenges: Worried about working with mentally disabled people
- New skills: Know the benefits of yoga
12th: Searched up for: Mental disability, MINDS, positive impacts of Yoga Therapy
19th: Shared our ideas about our past experience with yoga or disabled people
26th: Came up with questions we might want to ask MINDS about the disabled people which can aid the communication between us and our clients
*Service learning action plan, About MINDS, and The benefit of yoga.
October
- Challenges: Think of how can we teach them so they can understand
- New skills: Learnt some new yoga moves
3rd: A visit to minds: get to know more about them, the teacher went through a presentation with us. We asked all the questions we came up last month. We had a little interaction with them, and I understood the causes and effects behind mental disability.
10th: A short chat between ourselves: we organised the information we get and started on knowing our own Yoga Therapy program
17th: A group discussion on how we should show our clients what they should do, at the end of the session we shared our own techniques and Mrs. Veron taught us some of her’s.
* We are trying to figure out the moves in pairs
*Our initial plan
November
- Challenges: How should I react when I don’t understand their hand gestures and body movements
- New skills: k
7th: We met our clients for the first time! The yoga therapy went quite well as my client is following my moves really well. When he is asked to raise they hand(signals breath in), he repeats the word ‘up’. Therefore, when he is not focused, I repeat the word for him so he realises what he needs to do. I can tell that they felt much more relax after the yoga therapy and I think it is not that hard compare to what I thought about it before. During the meditation, I realise different people have different level of disability. Some of them have done this for three years but still don’t know what are the moves. Some are really noisy and want attention; some are really quite but friendly. It furthered my understanding in mentally disabled people.
*Reflection on our initial plan
14th: We did a reflection on what happened and what can we improve. Me and my friend decide to change some of the ways to approach different moves as the clients are all at very different levels. For my friend’s client, she need to hold her hands and raise them up for her. However, my client can follow the moves really well(he is even more flexible than I am) but he needs to concentrate more and lower his volume. I heard from their teacher that when they are making noises it means they are trying to grab your attention. I guess I should try to pay more attention on him, and I can give it a try next week.
21st: Since our clients will be coming next week, today we make sure our reflection is on track. Mrs. Veron said I need to add a learning outcome in my reflection post so I chose ‘Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.‘ I think this can be well demonstrated because working with different kinds of people means there will be unfamiliarity and improvements. Hence, I think keeping a reflection around that will be a good thing for me to actually know what I’m learning from my experiences.
28th: We met our clients today. I’m glad Jace is more friendly than last time. As I’m less nervous this time I had time to take a closer look at other clients as well. Some of them refused to raise their hands, some of them were really loud. I actually proud of Jace as he only makes a coughing noise when he claps. Besides, he really understand the fact that I’m there to help him with the moves, and he trusts me when, for example, I put my hand under his back to aid his breathing. I was worried about if that is going to cause uncomfortableness, so I started of only putting half of my hand under. However, I suppose he thinks his hands are blocking my way as Jace raised his hands so I can stick my whole hand underneath. Plus, after knowing his name, its much easier to let him stay with me.
