Our Moldovan partners, Rain Kids, work with children with complex needs that affect their communication skills, concentration, ability to manage their emotions and more. The charity has a multi-disciplinary team working with the children so that they can provide specialist attention across the different areas of their development. This also means that they need to keep up-to-date across a range of specialities. Knowing how few professionals are equipped to support autistic children in Moldova, we have made training the focus of our support for them.
Over the last few months, the charity has set up a range of training opportunities for staff. Two of these stand out particularly. The first was a session on play with autistic children. Play is central to much of their 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 the whole team was able to take part in a training session to help them motivate the children to play, to structure their play sessions, and to help the children transfer the learning from play into real life situations. The charity was also able to buy toys that promote learning through play.
Anna Cislaru, Centre Co-ordinator for Rain Kids 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 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. They have already been able to use her learning with some of the children.
Thank you very much to everyone who has donated so we can help raise the standard of therapy for children in Moldova.
