Increase the skills of Moldovan autism therapists

The children we work with have complex needs that affect their communication skills, concentration, ability to manage their emotions and more.  This is why we organise our team so that different professionals can work alongside each other to support the children and their families.  It also means that we need to keep our skills as therapists up to date across a number of areas.

Thanks to generous donors in the GlobalGiving community and beyond, we have been able to take up some exciting training opportunities in the last few months.

Two of these stand out particularly.  The first was a session on play with autistic children.  Play is central to much of our therapy.  It doesn't just make therapy sessions fun, it also has value in itself.  Through play the children learn a whole range of physical and social skills.  However, for autistic children play can look different.  We were delighted that our whole team was able to take part in a training session to help us motivate our children to play, to structure our play sessions, and to help the children transfer the learning from play into real life situations.

Anna Cislaru, our Centre Co-ordinator took part in the second session, which was a two-day intensive training focussing on PECS - a pictoral language which can help children with significant difficulties in verbal communication to find 'their voice'.  She learned a huge amount about the whole process of introducing and using PECS with a child.  When she came back, she taught what she had learned to the rest of the team.  We have already been able to use her learning in sessions with some of our children.  The picture is an English language example to give you an idea of what PECS is.

Thank you very much to everyone who has donated so we can raise the standard of therapy we can offer our children.

NB the source for the PECS photo: Shashidhar Chandrashekhar and Jyothi S. Bommangoudar, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons