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So today has definitely been one of the best days I've had at ski school for the entire year. But first, the rest of the week has also been good, from Sunday through to Thursday I've had great kids all who were happy to be at ski school and listened and did as I asked. So it has really been ending on a high. I've had a lot of fun with the kids I have had this week and for the photo day I managed to get a silly photo up of me and Robin with the puppets. I also managed to get them into the children's photos as well hehe. There was also a child as well who had a Nan living in Leamington Spa, his father then told me she worked at Trinity School, when I said I went there he told me she was Angela Eden so that is pretty odd, small world. I also found out by another instructor that there is a Leamington Spa in Canada and they grow the tomatoes for Heinz Ketchup there.
But back on track, today was the best out of the whole week, I arrived at work and get told I have been given a special assignment. So I had to sit through morning meeting having no idea what was going to happen but after the meeting I was told to go to our work office to the board room and I've been placed in the Adaptive 'Wasps' programme for the day. This is a programme for children with learning and special needs, so I was surprised to be given the chance to teach on the programme. But I got to work with a little boy called Aiden who was 6 and is Autistic, I helped to work with a little boy who was deaf before at ski school but there was nothing wrong other than that. So I went to the lodge where I got to meet Aiden and his family along with Susan his main instructor/carer for the day. I took out the puppet which I am so glad I bought to work now and he took him straight away. We went to the Gondola with his family and there was no problems he really liked watching out of the windows when in them and he can get in and out of them no problem. His parents kept going up when we had to get off and he just said bye and walked out with us. We got his skis and we hid the puppet encase he focused too much on him instead of the skiing. We went up to the learning area and he carried his skis the entire way on his own and at the top put them on by himself as well.
At the top we first did a run with him skiing to Susan trying to get him to stop in the pizza wedge but he just ended up using her as a stop barrier, we then moved on to his turning by both of us skiing either side of him far apart and he had to ski to us and give us as high five as he reached us. The only problem we had with him was just before lunch when his ski's got stuck on the snow, he got frustrated that he could not move himself and even with him pushing him he was still stuck so we took him down for a break and had a cookie at the ski school. I managed to find Carley and she gave me some wax so we could fix his skis, we then went up the mountain to meet his family for lunch which they paid for and he looked after my puppet again. After that we went back down to the carpet and set up some poles for him to ski around he followed us down turning around them all but he still wouldn't do his snow plough. His parents came and watched for a while which was good it got him more excited as he was getting a bit bored of the run but he got his mum to follow him down which he liked and ended up doing his snow plough. After that we went back to the Gondola and I gave him my puppet again when we got to the bottom he said goodbye and gave the puppet back.
It was a really good experience and I was very lucky that I got to help teach him especially since he was so independent, I know that not all days would be so easy for the staff working in this programme, we barley had any problems other than the ski's getting stuck he was fine. I left the puppet for them to use tomorrow with him and we wrote down to try and get him to do his stops (he can do them when he wants) to use the puppet as a prize i.e. 5 stops and you can have the puppet.
We had a group ski school photo with most of the mini instructors today as well, so I am waiting for that to be uploaded onto our ski school website. And we also had the Ski School cinema night to watch Hot Tub Time Machine which was a good film very funny and a good cast in it. Nothing else much has happened since all this.
Liz x
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