The Pre-school Learning Alliance is a leading educational charity specialising in the early years. The Alliance provides practical support to over 15,000 early years settings and makes a positive contribution to the care and education of over 800,000 young children and their families each year.

Each year the Alliance organises a conference and a series of workshops to illustrate best practise in early years care.

This years programme included four workshops presented by Pat Atkinson from the National Association of Toy & Leisure Libraries. Pat’s workshop was all about "Switched Play".

I had the opportunity to meet with Pat and loan her a series of switched adapted toys to support her workshops. These are Pat’s comments on the event:

In the “Switched Play” workshop at the PLA Inclusion conference I had planned to demonstrate my usual stock of performing animals with pressure switches and a latching & timing box, and a collection of simple radio controlled vehicles with different controllers. The chance to try the Dream-Racer car and performing animals with the games controller added an exciting extra dimension to the event. These new items brought me up to date and showed that hat control is a wonderful addition to the range of switched play options for children with physical impairments. Now I need to refine the head action to reduce the chaos that my car playing creates. Maybe a slower vehicle could be added to the range?

Pat Atkinson, Trainer for the National Association of Toy & Leisure Libraries. March 2008.

Mike

A few weeks ago we started to work on a series of switch adapted toys for young (3 to 7 years) children. We’ve had a lot of fun with these little guys and so we decided to share some videos on Google.

These are the links:

I’m meeting the supplier at the end of March to figure out what will be in the Dream-Toys catalogue on the Dream-Racer web site.

Mike

Recently I received an invitation to visit the Blackfriars School in Newcastle. Gillian, Daniels mum, prompted the invite by telling Glynis, one the the teachers at the school about the Dream-Gamer we gave Danny last Christmas.

I took this extract from the school web site.

"Blackfriars School is a large special school of 180 pupils from the age of 2 to 19 with a range of physical, learning, medical and sensory needs who come from North and Central Staffordshire and the Unitary Authority of Stoke-on-Trent. The School is dual sited, with pupils aged 2 – 16 years educated on the site in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Post 16 education is based in Bucknall, some six miles away in the City of Stoke-on-Trent. Blackfriars has built an expertise in providing Alternative and Augmentative Communication for pupils and students who require support with communication."

My first visit was to the Newcastle site. The first thing we did was to show the younger pupils some of the switch adapted toys we are working on. The yellow chick singing about "taking a bath" was a big hit as well as Shrek doing his dance.

Danny joined us and showed everyone his skills by driving a Dream-Racer Toyota Supra car around the hall. That was until Jason, one of the teachers, wanted a go and it seemed to get "confiscated" for the rest of the break time.

Just a few days ago I went along to the senior school in Bucknall and took the switch we’ve designed for connecting to Soundbeam equipment. If you’re not familiar with Soundbeam take a look at their web site it’s a really amazing piece of kit for making music through body movement.

We’ve decided to call the switch Dream-Melody – I’ll be writing more about this over then next few weeks.

Mike