We were also involved in the art craftwork. This helps develop friendships, respect for others, and sense of identity, self-esteem, self-awareness as well as confidence, the sharing of experiences, ideas also enhances the way a person thinks. It also influences and enhances empowerment of knowledge, development of interpersonal skills as well. This is taken from the social perspective whereby people will associate with a common cause, to come up with something original and straight from someone’s mind. Being original and creative helps build high esteem and values as well. It will be foolish not to consider something that should relate to the intellectual part of a service user. In trying to figure out the creativity, encourage the improvement of concentration, memory, problem solving, imagination, holding a conversation or communicating effectively with other, comparing and contrasting following instructions, and decision making we had to go shopping this is one of the most favourites especially to the service user who spend the greater part of his life in a house. To create a different environment shopping answers the question of being stressed and enhances self-esteem. This increase the thinking capacity of the service user, allowing them to use their imagination, creativity skills and intelligence to match and decide upon the things to shop and why they do what they are do. All of this could be fruitless as long as a person is not physically fit, willing and able to do so for as to achieve a great deal when it comes to fitness, going to swimming helps out as it satisfies physical development needs like gross and fine motor skills, the hand-eye coordination. This also promotes cardiovascular health, fitness, flexibility, stamina, improved sleep, relief of stress, relaxation and helps also develop muscles. All this helps out especially in a person with a learning disability in a way they will sometimes be stressed by the activities they are daily involved in, so something physical helps them out because at least they can exercise a bit.
The greatest possible way is the planning section of the entire activities. The drawing board is were everything effectively accomplishes its way or that’s where everything just does not materialise. In the cooking activity I made sure that we had all the resources that we needed. All these revolved around setting up a kitchen that had no slippery floor, cables and cords were precisely on their places to reduce the hazards. The facilities that l needed was the cooker and some kitchen utensils like pots and pans, strainer, cutlery, chopping boards and plates together with the table and chairs. We set our time frame to about three hours so as to include preparations and the washing ups as well. As l had my client to concentrate on cooking and supervising him was a bit too much l managed to cope as l left him to do some of the non-dangerous activities. Water was set to lukewarm for the purposes of health and hazard. We used knives that are not too sharp for our safety. On the issue relating to art and craft all material was gathered and put on one place prior to starting a project. All the material had to be non-hazardous. A great deal had to be done in dealing with the swimming, we had to go to a pool which was not too deep with warm water and with no slippery surfaces as there can cause falls and some serious damages to an individual in case they fall. For convenience and security there were other people at the pool to safeguard us and give us a hand in case we needed to have any, as l wasn’t professional trained to go in the water. For our shopping we had to restrict ourselves to time and the money we had so that we do not overspend unnecessarily. The entire shopping list had to be done well before and the rough estimates were done as well. This helped to stick within our budget as l cited earlier on.
On all my activities l had planned for my client there was a common answer that is happiness seen on the faces of the people and the most important one was from my client. I saw him portray a happy face, stress free and a happy person despite the times we had to go through sometimes. These included planning sometimes, trying to compromise and reach some final decision and agreeing upon all these sometimes was not that easy.
I enjoyed this time, as l was kept busy on my toes trying to plan ahead and face up the challenges and step up to the play.
