Educational Conference

The ADVANCE Society & the Learning Resource Center are glad to announce their ninth annual educational conference under the theme of: "Road Map to Positive Behavior," from 19^th to 21^st March, 2009, hosted by the British InternationalSchool in Cairo (BISC)

Our conference this year, "Road Map to Positive Behavior," will cover the following seven streams:

1. Parenting with Positive Behavior Support

2. Behavioral Disorders in Preschool Children

3. Effective Strategies for Behavioral Management in Schools

4. Emotional and Behavioral Challenges

5. Behaviors of Children with Sensory and/Or Motor Difficulties

6. Correlation between Communication Difficulties and Behavior

7. Health and Related Behaviors

We are happy to announce that we have 4 occupational therapists presenting this year. The following are abstracts of these workshops & lectures:

Importance of Seating for Enhancing Adaptive Function Cerebral Palsy (Presented in English)

Lecturer: Angela Pilski

Précis : Teachers and Therapists strive to provide excellent treatment and care, only to place the child into inadequate and often harmful Seating. Good Seating should act as an extension of Therapy and, combined with Sleep Positioning Systems, provide a 24 hour management of Spasticity. It also assists with autonomic functions such as breathing and maintains good health. It reduces absenteeism in educational programs, and allows the child to sit longer with less fatigue, improves functional use of extremities, and generally allows the child to make eye contact. Good seating improves the appearance of children to the point where it might make the difference between them attending mainstream school or not. There are many techniques and systems that have been developed to assist Therapists. Seating is, however, considered to be a specialty in Europe and North America, where specialized centers have Rehabilitation Engineers as well as Therapists who are skilled in a wide variety of modalities. Raising the awareness of the need for good Seating will hopefully provide comfort to a population who are often not able to speak for themselves. This lecture will demonstrate the need to sit well with the intrinsic spinal curves in place and address how that affects vision and upper extremity function, and how mobility affects learning.

Handwriting! I hate it! (Presented in English)

Lecturer: Farah Sabra

Précis : “My daughter is very bright and inquisitive. Now they started teaching cursive at school and she hates it!”

“I am a teacher and my 4 year old student throws markers away and cries when attempting to write”.

Handwriting is an integral part of every child’s school experience. Some students have difficulty in the production of legible handwriting. Negative behaviors might result from handwriting difficulties (i.e. crying, pulling away, tantrums, throwing writing utensils, withdrawal and giving up). Many factors contribute to illegible writing. It is necessary for teachers and parents to understand the factors underlying the skill of handwriting in order to address difficulties and decrease negative behaviors resulting from them. This workshop will address these issues by discussing the principal components necessary for developing writing skills and activities to develop these components.

Understanding Sensory Challenges (Presented in English)

Lecturer: Fatima Chehouri-Nasser

Précis : Professionals are often faced with the challenging question of whether the child's current behavioral problems are just tantrums or are related to other underlying sensory deficits. Occupational therapists are trained to make functional observations in all aspects of the child's life--at school, in the home environment, at play--as well as to detect and further assess sensory deficits. Scientific research in the area of sensory integration and sensory dysfunction has shown that children with sensory processing difficulties exhibit problems in behavior such as aggressiveness, inattention, distractibility and defiance. It is important to identify the difference so that the proper strategies can be used to decrease and/or eliminate the unwanted behaviors, thus increasing the chances for optimal learning.

Sensory Challenges (Presented in Arabic)

Presenter: Majdi Bzoor

Precis: How being hypersensitive and/or hyposensitive in relation to one's senses can affect a child's behavior.

For more information on how to register please call Yasser Salah at the Learning Resource Center, Tel: (+202) 25163965 or 67 or e-mail: lrcttc@yahoo.com

Thank you and I hope many can attend this conference.

Laura