Hi Everyone!

My name is JoAnne Sadowski and I am curently a senior here at Canisius College. I signed up for the Child, Family, and Community Practicum although it is really more of a School Psycholgy Practicum (which is what I eventually want to get into). I chose to do my internship at the Robert Warner Rehab Center through Women and Children's Hospital. I am working along side a School Psychologist, a Special Ed Counselor, and numerous Special Ed teachers. Since I am a substitite teacher-aide at this site, I wanted to get to see the other side of how this particular program works. Over the summer and last spring, I worked with the children at this site as a teacher aide in a Therapeutic Preschool classroom. It was a 8-1-1 class in which all children were between the ages of 3 and 5. They all were referred to this program for emotional and behavioral issues and received a variety of treatment including behavior modification which was implemented routinely throughout the day, speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy and play therapy. It was such a learning experience working with the children for such a significant amount of time, that I wanted to see how it all worked behind the scenes. I got to know the School Psychologist and she allowed me to be her undergrad intern for the fall semester. Below are a few summaries of what a typical week involved.

Week of Sept 18th - 22th 2006
This week I sat in on an evaluation of a child with significant speech articulation delays. We implemented the Bailey and he scored in the low average range. While the school psychologist interviewed the father of the child, I got to play with him and while he found ways of communicating his wants and needs, he rarely used verbal cues. He mostly pointed, grunted and mumbled. While the school psychologist cannot officially recommend a specific type of treatment, she made note on his record that he had a severe speech delay specific to the articulation of words.

Week of Oct 30th - Nov 3rd 2006
This week was definitely an "eye-opening" experience for me. On Monday we had an evaluation for a little girl, "Lori" who what 3yrs and 6months old. She was bright, bubbly and very excited to play the games that were apart of the WPSII test. Lori was born to a mother who was diagnosed with schozophrenia and PKU. Due to her condition, the mother is unable to be alone with her daughter and therefore has her sister-in-law with her most of the time. (During the evening hours, her husband is home and the sister-in-law goes back to her own house.) Lori's Aunt has a very obnoxious and controlling personality and pretty much does not let Lori's mother have any say while she is around. During the social history interview, Lori's Aunt would not let her mother answer any questions.

Week of Nov 13th - 17th
This week I went to a Buffalo CPSE meeting for a child who had gone through our evaluation process and was looking for approval for services. He is in need of speech therapy. He was currently getting in-home speech therapy 3x a week. He is 4 years old and is going to be 5 next spring and has not yet been placed in any sort of preschool/daycare setting. The Buffalo board urged the parents to enroll their son in some sort of preschool program so that he could be somewhat familiar with a school type setting before entering kindergarten. The parents were very apprhensive and argued with the board but after explaining that the speech therapy would be better implemented in a school setting with peers and teaccher cooperation, they finally agreed that it would be best for their son. The Buffaol board approved speech to continue for 3x per week as long as the child was enrolled in a program for the speech therapist to go to by January.



Psy498PracticumLog