Helping children with additional needs

You’ll have to give extra support to children with extra needs. Their needs may be:

physical disability
behavioral or psychological disorders
learning difficulties
personality problems
mood swings
family circumstances and needs
cultural differences from the culture of his/her peers
communication difficulties
risk of not achieving identified outcomes
unknown diagnosis

Somebody else will normally design the strategies, often a specialist working in cooperation with your supervisor. Each strategy will be tailored to the needs of individual child, and have a set of goals and explain how to achieve them. It might also explain how the child should fit into the rest of the group. It will also fit into the Cybertots behavior support plan.

You will also help developing a personalized behavior support plan for the child. Your role will probably be to make sure the plan is practical in your particular situation and you know what to do. It may be helpful to have a list of possible responses for each particular situation you will face.

When it comes to implementation, you don’t have to know all about it; you should get advice from your supervisor, who will work in consultation with the specialist and the child’s parents.

As the staff member on the floor, you’ll have to note any issues of concern for discussion with your supervisor, for example:

The child responds in unexpected ways
The child changes their responses in unexpected ways
The child shows symptoms of distress or illness
Incidents not addressed by planned strategies
The strategy didn’t anticipate some kinds of incidents
The child does not make progress