Happy Halloween!

First of all, Happy Halloween to all at home! I am currently sitting on the bus composing the first part of this post for my blog – hopefully my battery power will last throughout the whole day. Today we are off to the Little Tiger Kindergarten for the morning – the guests are off to the Jade Buddha Temple this morning.

We were scheduled to observe the children at the Little Tiger Kindergarten, but there was a bit of a glitch – the children and their parents were off on an autumn field trip today. These outings happen on the last Friday of every month, and there was no way to reschedule the outing just because of our visit.

The Little Tiger Kindergarten has a variety of programs that serve the hearing impaired and communication impaired children in Shanghai. They run three different programs – the Rehabilitation Centre and the Outpatient Centre, which are just for children with disabilities, and the Kindergarten program, which is for both typically developing and disabled children. All three programs service children ranging in age from 2 – 6 years old.

At this point in time, there are more than 100 children participating in the Rehabilitation Centre and Kindergarten Program. The Rehabilitation Centre has nine classes of six students each – these children are all communication disabled children. The Kindergarten Program has four classes of 15 to 20 students per class (80 % typical kids, 20 % disabled children).

The Rehabilitation Centre involves group classes for the students, an hour of individual training every day, as well as significant parent training programs. One of the questions that the presenter asked us was how to speed up the process that they have going to allow them to service more kids – I personally believe that they are doing an awesome combination of services and the kids’ progress shows that.

It costs 3000 – 5000 Yuan per month to send your child here – a two worker family may make double that (so ½ your monthly income goes to educating your child). The government is not much involved in paying for these things – hopefully, that will change over time.

The Little Tiger Kindergarten is also the place where Speech-Language Pathologists receive their clinical training. It is associated with the East China University, and the University Program started a Speech-Language Pathology training program in 2005. So far they have enrolled 120 students to complete Bachelor’s degrees, and there are currently 30 students doing graduate work at the Master’s and Ph.D levels.

After discussing the Little Tiger Kindergarten in the morning, we went for another amazing lunch. We were honored to have our Chinese counterparts from Little Tiger Kindergarten and the University join us for lunch – giving us time for conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Our afternoon was spent learning about the College of Preschool Education and Special Education at the East China Normal University. Dr. Yueng presented an overview of the College, which includes three majors (Special Education, Psychology and the Future of Special Education, and Speech and Hearing Sciences). The college is the first of its kind in mainland China, and was established in 1997.

The Speech and Hearing Science major was introduced in 2004. This means that they have just graduated their first class of students with their bachelor’s degrees (17 students in the spring of 2008). Their curriculum differs from Canadian training schools in some ways (they get to take a course in Music Therapy), but they cover the same general areas of learning that we do at home. They also have started a small number of research projects as well – it will be interesting to learn more about these projects over time.

One of our delegates is a Angela Fong, who is a student completing her Master’s degree program at the University of Toronto. She did a wonderful presentation for us in the afternoon which outlined the statistics related to and set up for Speech-Language Pathology education programs in Canada. It was very informative and I know that I learned a lot about how training programs may have changed somewhat since I graduated. Thank you to Angela for that presentation!

After such a busy academic day, we were able to re-join our guests and go for supper. Another fabulous meal – and for me it was a little bit better than other meals because I got to drink a DIET COKE with my meal. They have been few and far between, which for anyone who knows me will attest, is a huge thing! We also got “ice cream” for dessert – it was good but it was definitely different than the ice cream I was used to.

The best part of the meal time I think was getting to see silk embroidery – both watching the woman doing it and looking at the finished projects all over the gallery. The prices ranged from $ 120.00 US to $ 28,000.00 US, but considering how much time went into the projects, they would have been worth every penny. I will upload many pictures of the pictures, but Yvette and Darren bought a really nice piece, as did Wendy. I wish I had brought more money with me, because I would have been bringing a small piece of art home with me too.

We took a boat tour of the Huangpu River after dinner – it was a little misty so it was sometimes hard to see the buildings. However, it was great to visit with everyone – and now here I am, back at the hotel, bidding everyone good night as I get ready to climb in. I still owe everyone posts describing Tuesday and Wednesday – I will get to them as soon as I possibly can!