Job coaching with client

After about a month and a half of working with a client for preparation of a job and for volunteering at the Tuscaloosa Association for Retarded Citizens I am now going to start job coaching on May 9th, 2010. The client is also learning to read as well and I am the one who is teaching her to read from her People First of Alabama hand book and also with an animal picture book that she brings in with her from her appartment to learn new words. I am patient with the client as I help her to pronounce and enunciate words by how the letters sound. It has been a success so far working with this client on the job preparation process and I have gotten to know of her interests and been able to see her skills at cleaning at bathrooms, vacuuming, and dusting desks at the Palk Enterprises and Supported Employment office in Tuscaloosa. She has done well and I have gotten along well with her as well as we have worked from sample job duties hand books over the last month and a half to get her used to what she needs to do when she works at the office of the Ability Alliance of West Alabama. The job hand book has pictures of sweeping, mopping, dusting, taking out the garbage, and shredding paper so that the client can associate the pictures with her job tasks. Yet I am taking it one step further and that is teaching her how to read what I have wrote under the pictures over the time she is working with us so that she can have basic reading skills for the benefit of this job that she will with AAWA and any other jobs she will have in the future. Reading skills are important to have and it is never to late for someone to learn how to read as many would say it is hard for people to start learning to read at an older age but to me that is a defeatist attitude to have about the wisdom of learning and the wisdom of getting older. The job coaching that I will be doing will be around the tasks of sweeping, mopping, dusting, cleaning bathrooms, taking out garbages, and shredding papers amongst the offices at the Ability Alliance of West Alabama. I hope that as others from the Tuscaloosa ARC see that Amanda has a good job that they will want my help in getting jobs for them and or in job preparation for them when they need the help. Therefore the success of this particular client on her job can be a good example for other clients of the Ability Alliance of West Alabama that they too can have a job and be able to work.