7. Using Play Therapy as a Method of Integration and Rehabilitation: Teaching Material

The political responsibility of politicians and policy to create equal opportunities between people with and without special needs: On the situation in the Federal Republic of Germany.

This offers a report on how people with special needs are integrated into society in Germany, with the main emphasis placed on integration in kindergarten, school, college and further education.

Prominence is also given to those prescriptive approaches in the recently passed Sozialgesetzbuches IX (German Social Law Code), which places a particular value on facilitating the participation of people with special needs in the life of the community.

Siegfried Zoels:

From invalid to partner - From sympathy to help and participation. A personal view of a new societal orientation emerging over the past decades.

Over the last 40 years, a sea-change has taken place in our general understanding of «disabled people». The author describes these changes from a personal point of view, drawing on his active experience in the area from 1969/1970. The themes given special attention are:

Caring for children with special needs in homes and the process of change taking place there

Including people with special needs in further training workshops for industrial designers and the UNESCO Creativity Workshops deriving from them

Opening up of kindergartens and day-care centres to a whole range of new impulses, including the integration of children with special needs in normal kindergartens and day-care facilities

Developing more innovative methods together with people with special needs and transferring these methods into other areas of communal life in society.

Siegfried Zoels:

Using play and toys to promote development in children with special needs (The conceptual approach underlying the work of the Berlin-based organisation «Toys for Children's Rehabilitation» (Fordern durch Spielmittel - Spielzeug ftir behinderte Kinder e.V.)

The principles behind the organisation's work are presented, together with details of the projects they have been and are involved in:

International UNESCO Creativity Workshops, where participants from all over the world meet to design innovative toys

Integration Workshops where people with special needs further develop toy designs and develop independent product solutions

Workshops for parents and carers encouraging participants to develop and train their own senses and become aware of the conscious use of toys for early development

«Work and Training for mentally handicapped pupils» - a project preparing school pupils for their later entry into the world of work.

Next year, «Fordern» plans to open a Ludothek, providing the chance for toys to be borrowed, and combining this with testing toys for their therapeutic qualities.

Reimunde Steudel:

Methodological material for integrative education

Games are presented that are designed to train our different senses in a variety of ways:

Games for the sense of smell and taste, and

Hearing

Touching

Seeing.

Beate Punge/Svetlana Kolkova:

A brief bilingual dictionary (German-Russian) giving the most important terms from the special educational area (based on German specialist literature).

A selection of 21 key terms in educational rehabilitation explained in German and Russian.

Translated by Andrew Boreham