Lisa aka Darky from adders.org forum boards has given permission to add this about a Passport For Kids With SEN. She wrote to me about this saying "this idea has come from the local sen school working in partnership with my good freind who co-ordinates the support group. there has been a couple of pilots already, and we decided that it would be something that would be useful for our children who cannot always access out reach service. its simple, but we believe to be an effective way of promoting the whole school awareness policy. we feel lots of times our kids get into difficulty in school, is when the kids get supply teachers, or TA'S who do not usually have the right to this kind of information.
So thanks to Lisa for giving permission to use this here.
The principle of it is this, a folder, like a scrap book, is set up with the childs picture and contains all their likes and dislikes, what they enjoy doing, what they are good at and things they struggle with.
The child is invited to add their own information too.
This will be done in partnership with parents too, their input into it is very important.
Also the folder will also contain a chart, which is broken down into time periods.
The idea is to monitor the childs mood, so a sticker or a drawing of a smily face, or straight face or sad face, the child is invited to express their feelings at the time. The idea of it is to try and identify if there are any patterns of negitive behaviour, also identifying things they enjoy doing.
Sometimes its a matter of trying to find a pattern to identify what may trigger negative behaviour.
Lisa said:
"My freind and their school tried this with her son and it quickly became noticable her son struggled with assembly, he was removed from assessmbly and re-intergrated at his own pace, its worked wonders and reduced his anxiety about it!"
I want to thank Lisa for giving me details of this and the child profile idea both of which sound like great ideas to help all those in contact with our children find ways of getting to know more about them when they first come into contact with them which should we hope enable them to work more with our children and allow our children to flourish in a safe, secure and friendly environment!
Let's hope that this is an idea that could be taken up within many schools.