Creating the Communication Boards

A blessing from the print shop:

After many hours tucked away and eyes glued to a computer, I was finally able to print off some of the communication boards I discussed in my recent blogs. This project has been my main priority within the daycare so I was very excited to start turning our digital copies into something more tangible for the children to use.

To recap my project, I have been working on creating "Communication Boards" that the children can use to express themselves. Many children at the daycare have sensory disabilities and/or motor deficiencies that hinder their ability to speak and communicate. To make matters even worse, the volunteers going to the daycare all speak different languages so it makes communcating with the children even more difficult. These children aren't going to school so development and language acquisition at this point in their lives are crucial. Therefore, we came up with the idea of using "Key-Word Sign" boards that display pictures translated in both Vietnamese and in English. I designed the boards to show vocabulary words and transitional words that correspond to the likes, dislikes, emotions, and learning goals of each child.

The first day at the print shop was very difficult. The language barrier made it hard to explain to the print-staff how I wanted to each board to look like. Two hours and a large headache later, I was able to walk away with 2 out of the 3 booklets printed and laminated. I want to thank the Hamills, Aunt Donna, and my Grandpa for supplying me with money to help pay for the boards =) I still have 7-9 more booklets to make so the donations are very appreciated.

The next day I had to go back to the print shop and finish printing the last communication board and feeding poster. This attempt went much more smoothly and I was able to get everything printed in record time without any mishaps! That was the first blessing =) Then, as I was getting ready to pay, the print-shop owner flagged down another woman standing to the side and whispered some words to her that she later translated into English for me. Ben and I had were pretty frequent costumers in printing manuals and other educational devices for the kids so owner wanted to thank us for our help in the school. She gave us the poster and the 3rd booklet for free =)

I was originally very worried about publicly printing out the manuals. As a volunteer, I try to keep the work we do private because there is a fine line between wanting to help from a passionate point of view and being portrayed as someone carrying the "white-man's burden." Everyone from the shop kept looking at the posters and reading them so I was afraid of looking like the latter. However, I was wrong. The staff was very happy and grateful for our work =) As I was leaving the woman who translated for me asked for my number and invited me out for coffee. She is very interested in learning about our project and what our volunteer group is doing.

Here is a snapshot of just 2 out of the 30 communication board pages: