BUSHkids 2016-17 Annual Report

CEO2

Helping kids in Mount Isa get the most from their schooling

Case Study

Early in 2017, members of the BUSHkids team met with the Principal and Guidance Officer of Townview State School in Mount Isa. The school had identified a significant number of children starting prep in 2017 who had not attended any formal education before then, and had specific needs in areas of language skills (comprehension and expression), phonological awareness and fine motor skills. Following discussion with the school’s special needs and prep teachers, the need for multidisciplinary support from BUSHkids’ Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) and Occupational Therapist (OT) was identified as a way of helping the children’s development. Group intervention was seen as the most appropriate way to provide support to a number of students, whilst maximising resources and mirroring the general class activities with which the kids were just becoming familiar. The BUSHkids team conducted general screening, classroom observations and discussions with classroom teachers to determine which students would benefit from group intervention and the best way to provide it. A multidisciplinary group program targeting language, phonological awareness and fine motor skills was identified as the most effective way of supporting the kids in need of help. Before starting the group sessions, 16 students were screened to determine their strengths, weaknesses and specific support needs. This process also helped provide a benchmark of the students’ skills prior to support and gauge their progress as a result of the group program. Following this, BUSHkids staff met with the prep teachers again to identify goals for the group programs so the children could get the most out of their schooling. Specific goals included helping the students to: develop their print knowledge to recognise meaning and distinguish print from pictures develop their phonological awareness to identify

Additionally, the team was to provide the prep teachers with strategies suitable for ongoing use in the class- room to further support the students’ development and increase their participation in educational activities. Four 45-minute sessions were run weekly for a full school term for groups of four children from each of the school’s two prep classes. The SLP/OT (or ‘SPOT’) groups were designed to target children’s language and fine motor skills through a shared book-reading activity, followed by themed activities relating to the book. This approach was based around core principles from the Read and Grow and Fingergym™ programs. Evidence shows that: literacy is dependent on experience and develops as a result of teaching and modelling language skills before children start formal education reading stories with children develops their early literacy skills children require regular opportunities to practise fine motor skills to successfully partake in classroom activities. During term, the team held regular meetings to report on the students’ progress, including their participation in the group sessions and performance in class. Although attendance in the group sessions fluctuated over the course of the term, by helping the teachers provide ongoing support in the classroom, all the kids improved in the areas targeted by the group activities. At the end of the program, the BUSHkids team met the teachers to discuss the results and provide recommendations and further individualised support some students might need. Everyone agreed the group program had been a success and, as a result, the approach has been adopted by another Mount Isa school, with the BUSHkids team focusing on helping students improve their social and self-regulation skills.

Future directions for the Allied Health Services • Continue collaboration with other services/community stakeholders to ensure services are responsive, targeted and provide good outcomes for communities community capacity-building – building ability of parents/carers/ educators to support develop- ment, social–emotional skills in kids • Innovative ways of providing services: telehealth services • Re-focus on outcome measures: ensuring what we do and how we do it is achieving the outcomes (e.g. collection of pre-/post-measures from those accessing services) • Continue to investigate ways of increasing access for vulnerable members of the community • Maintain focus on education sessions and

when two words identify a rhyming pattern increase their vocabulary to promote their understanding and use of unfamiliar words increase their fine motor skills to improve co-ordination of both hands, visual-motor abilities and fine motor skills.

Pupils at Glennie Heights State School inWarwick looking very sun-smart in their BUSHkids bucket hats!

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