I am proud to announce exciting progress with Ayllu, our global online learning community. We are on track to publish our first video course by March 30. The course will be called “How to establish a successful learning environment”, directed at Spanish–speaking parents of children with intellectual disabilities. The course will offer (8) modules of evidence-based strategies proven effective for working with children with intellectual disabilities, primarily autism. We have made the decision to film the entire first course module in Peru with a professional camera crew and film studio!
Several of us professionals continue to write the scripts for the video curriculum, and we have successfully recruited (3) former Manos Unidas Peru teachers as course instructors. These three teachers participated in our former autism education training program and are veteran instructors to Manos Unidas for over 10 years. They find themselves currently unemployed due to budget cuts so we have recruited them to help shoot the first of our video curriculum series.
Family Participation
Family members are a very important piece to this work and we will be including them in the instructional videos. The proposed structure of each video includes a short studio-based instructional shoot where we introduce and explain the strategy and give a short demonstration. The second piece of the video will go into the home of a family. The home-based portion of the videos aim to capture how a parent would implement the strategy within their own environment and adapt it to their child’s skill level and needs. Our hope is that these “real life” examples are used to build relatedness for families and help us build our learning community.
We are proud to announce we have three families with young children in Cusco who are willing to “star” in these clips. These families will also be the first families invited to participate in our project test pilot, scheduled to launch in May.
Aylluglobal.com
We are proud to be working on the domain that will host the courses, present international webinars, facilitate family chats and offer video consultations with families around the world. Stay tuned . . . . it will be published this month.
Pilot Project Participants
We currently have three non-governmental organizations serving children with disabilities, two in Peru and one in Mexico, lined up to participate in Ayllu’s Pilot Project as well as six Latino families, two in the Seattle area and three in Peru. If you personally know a Spanish speaking family with a young child with an intellectual disability who may be interested in participating in our pilot project, please contact us! Our goal is approximately 10-12 families for our test pilot. Thank you!