Trainee Role Model

In November Jemima was invited to attend the One Voice family weekend in Blackpool. This event is for families with children aged under 12 using communication aids. Jemima was asked to give a short presentation to a parents' workshop about what she has done with the One Voice Teenagers and how she has benefited from it. She was also to act as a trainee role model throughout the weekend, alongside the adult role models who are always involved in One Voice events. This is her presentation.

Hello, my name is Jemima. I am 17. I live at High Shincliffe, near Durham. My school is Northern Counties in Newcastle. I got my Dynavox when I was about 8 but it did not work very well because I had problems with all the switches I tried. Finally I got my throat switch and I was really excited. It was the first time I could work something by myself.

Soon after I went to One Voice at Blackpool. It was a Harry Potter weekend and we did little plays. I really enjoyed it and it made me want to use my Dynavox. It was the first time I saw lots of people using communication aids to do interesting things. I went to Blackpool three times and I felt sad when I could not go again.

So I was very happy and excited when I heard about the first One Voice teenager weekend. I have been to all four and they were all great! I like meeting the One Voice teenagers, they are my friends because I see them every year. It is good working with the role models because they are quite young and cool, just a few years older than us, and they are doing interesting things like going to university or starting a business. That helps me to think about the future.

The teenager projects are a little bit more serious than Blackpool. We have lots of fun and great discos but we think about things too. We have done workshops about good and bad things about communication aids and thought about what we are good at and how we can help people understand what we need. We had an exciting weekend making the Listen to me DVD and music video. I thought that was fantastic because I am really interested in making films. Last summer we talked about transition. That was useful because it helped me think about what I want to do and my dreams for the future. Some of us did presentations at the family network day. The first time me and my parents saw role models doing presentations we were amazed but now we can do the same. One Voice has helped me become more confident and positive. Now I am learning to be a role model. I want to help younger children who are starting to use communication aids. That is one of my ambitions for the future.

Blossom haiku

I wrote this haiku in August 2008 while enjoying an excellent meal at Blossom on Columbus Avenue, between 82nd and 83rd, near the Natural History Museum.

Hungry to be nourished:
Salt, sweet, tang.
Replete, too soon a memory.

Winter

When bony fingers of a north wind probe
and nip,
and channerin frosts gnaw
and drape all in an icy shroud,
the watery sun,
exposed when muslin clouds disrobe,
wanly illumines
leaf and grass,
brick and tile,
disclosing pallid liveries of winter.

Me and my dream

Last weekend, Jemima volunteered to give a presentation at the One Voice family network day. One Voice supports families with children using Alternative and Augmentative Communication, particularly high tech communication aids, and the annual summer weekend is one of the highlights of Jemima's year. Role model presentations raise the aspirations of children and parents by showing them what AAC users can do, and now Jemima and her friends, the first generation of One Voice children, are themselves ready to act as role models. The teenagers' workshops the previous day had focused on transition, and Jemima chose to talk about herself and one of her current ambitions:

Hello! My name is Jemima. I am seventeen. My favourite TV show is Dr. Who and my favourite movies are the Harry Potter films, Narnia and Prince Caspian, High School Musical and the Japanese animated films made by Studio Ghibli. I also like some of my parents' old films like Four Weddings and a Funderal and Sleepless in Seattle.

I'm profoundly deaf. I understand sign language. I like talking with my voice but I can speak more clearly with my Dynavox. I use scanning with a voice switch. That is slow and hard work.

I will stay at my school for one of two more years. Then I think I'll go to Northern Counties College. I want to study ICT and I hope to do some courses in a local college. I want to learn about film making. I was first interested in film making when my dad videoed holidays and family events. My first experience of how a real film is made was at the One Voice weekend in Blackpool in 2002. I loved the video. Then I made two Video Nation films for the BBC with my dad. I thought that was fun and interesting. We planned what we wanted to film and recorded me talking with my Dynavox. The first film was about me and my life. It was in a series called Voices. Then they asked me to do another one about Christmas. Last year I really enjoyed doing the One Voice DVD project. I liked working with Silverfish and seeing how they organised the filming and edited the film. I showed the DVD to my class when we made a film about our school for our Duke of Edinburgh Award. I interviewed someone who went to my school when she was a girl and has worked there for a long time.

Last month I learned about animation at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. It was a workshop for teenagers to celebrate the tenth birthday of the Angel of the North. I see the Angel every day when I go to school. They showed us how to do animation with paint, sand, plasticene and cutting paper. I chose paper and talked about my idea with my Dynavox. Everyone's work was edited into one film for the Angel's birthday party. I am waiting to get my copy. I really want to do more animation.

I saved up my birthday money and last Monday I got a little video camera. Now I am going to learn to shoot and edit films. That is my dream for the future.

The Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I’ve read Little House in the Big Woods and now I’m reading Little House on the Prairie. It’s the story of when Laura was a little girl in America about 140 years ago. Laura lives with her Ma and Pa, her big sister Mary and her little sister Carrie and the good dog Jack.

They live in a little house in the Big Woods in Wisconsin. The house is made of wood, it has beds, chairs, table and stove for cooking and a wood fire. It has an attic where they keep food like pumpkins for the winter. They have a cow to give them milk, and Ma makes butter and cheese. They have horses to go to different places to see their grandparents and aunties and uncles and cousins, and once Laura goes to town, to the store where they buy sugar, coffee and material to make clothes.

Pa goes hunting for food in the Big Woods, he shoots deer and sometimes bear and once their uncle Henry kills a pig. They grow vegetables and corn and Pa finds honey and the whole family help to collect maple syrup. They keep food for the winter because it’s really snowy.

Laura and Mary don’t have lots of toys, they have rag dolls and imagine a play house under the tree. At Christmas they get mittens and a candy stick and Laura has her rag doll. They think that’s really special.

In Little House on the Prairie the family decide to move west. They go in a covered wagon for many weeks and choose a new place to live. At first it’s like camping, but Laura’s father builds a house and digs a well. That’s really hard work and they have to find food on the prairie.

I think the books are really interesting because they are about a family who lived one hundred and forty years ago, so I learn about how people lived when they had to do everything by themselves, with no electricity and no television and telephones and computers. They make their clothes and toys, and grow and catch their food, they only go to a shop once or twice a year. It’s really different from our life.

Seed potatoes planted - all in one day!

The potatoes I planted in spring 2007 were a success: 21 seed potatoes yielded about 20 kg, about a month's worth of cooking. However, the flavour of the potatoes was remarkable only in being without distinction. Further, some potatoes were attacked by insects and/or by slugs. Others suffered from scab and/or blight.

Monday 5 May 2008 was a bank holiday in the UK, and the weather was unusually fine. An early start saw a rectangle of turf, 2 m x 3m cut and lifted. In the afternoon I rotavated the new bed with a borrowed rotavator that bucked and kicked, but did the job remarkably well. At tea-time the bed was raked and composted. I planted the potatoes as darkness fell. To date, this year, 64 seed potatoes have been planted: 32 Charlottes, 16 Juliettes and 16 Sunrise.

The bad news is that there are half as many potatoes again yet to be planted. Moreover, there is a bag of onion sets to go in. Looks like another job for Mister Rotavator.

Having sprung

As I walked out in the drizzle at 06:00 this morning, I felt far from hopeful that my ramble would be long before being compelled to squelch back home. There were two horses in the field where there are usually three, and only two of the highland cattle remained in their straw-strewn barn. I wondered about the great slaughterhouse in the sky where long-furred, long-horned, teddy-bear coloured cows are painlessly transformed into steaks for people with above-average amounts of wealth. However, I discovered the rest of the herd in a field further on down the lane. Jessica, one of two sanctuary donkeys, poked her head out of a stable door, but the drizzle discouraged her from venturing further. A field sardined with ewes and their adolescent lambs bleated plaintively - whether about the rain, about their lot in life, or about the impending demise of the lambs, who knows? The free-range hens sounded disgruntled about being still locked up in their barn. The turkeys expressed indignation that no-one had come to let them out. I heard the goats moving about restlessly in their stall. Two dogs came to greet me.

The walk was punctuated with scurrying bunnies. Some of them looked awfully young. Last weekend there was a dog-sized hare that I watched run for over a mile. A grey squirrel fussed about in the leaves, probably looking for last year's beech mast. A red deer trotted purposely across a field and over into the wood. When I peered down the bank, the deer sprinted off amongst the trees, barking with alarm and annoyance. Another red deer, with horns for antlers, startled as I rounded a hedgerow, leapt high in the air over a fence and across a field of fluorescent-yellow oilseed rape.

Somebody twanged a ruler on the desk - I think it was a great spotted woodpecker. Later I watched another as it peered fixedly and obsessively for grubs dislodged by its hammering. Chiffchaffs, impossible to see and impossible to mistake, called from the tree tops. Blue tits, great tits, coal tits and long-tailed tits flittered. Chaffinches and greenfinches fluttered. House martins darted, and sand martins mobbed. Robins chirruped, and wrens piped their flutey trills. Skylarks busked above empty fields. A yellow-hammer was after some bread without cheese. Thrushes sang their hearts out, and blackbirds called out the news, sometimes about the bully magpies that coughed and choked their way around the woods. There were jackdaws and rooks, and suspicious-looking crows watching what was going on. Last week a kingfisher darted along Hett Burn. A sparrow hawk arrowed along a hedgerow. A mallard duck quacked noisily as it lofted out of a wood frequented by foxes. A pair of greylag geese, honking softly, flew formation circles over the old farm buildings. Wood pigeons and collared doves cooed from oak branches. A family of white doves circled the white dovecot, looking for all the world like an Athena poster. A heron flew lazily from one side of the sky to the other. And all the time in the hedgerows, the chatter and busyness of small brown birds of indeterminate kind.

There were banks of celandine and yellow primroses, and a scattering of cowslips. Beneath the hedgerows were purple violets. The woodland floor had been touched by the flame of the first bluebells.

It seemed that I was the only person alive in the springtime world.