KINE - P393 Internship

I completed my internship during my final semester at K1ds Count Therapy. I really enjoyed getting to work with new people in a new location. I worked with another intern and we both worked together on many projects together throughout the semester. All in all, this internship was a really great experience, and I have been able to work on so many different projects this semester. I am using this page to showcase some of my projects that I am most proud of. 

A lot of the time I, along with the other intern, work on creating activities that the therapists are able to easily grab for their sessions. Together we have created many crafts and activities that the therapists can chose from to use in their sessions. We have collaborated with the staff to make sure that the activities we plan are actually going to get used and target skills that the clients are working on in their therapy sessions. 

Vocational skills are practical skills that are used when performing different life skills. For these activities we target skills that the children will need to use in the future. We created multiple activities for the SPOT classroom to use for their daily stations and independent work. Each activity targets a different life skill that is important for a person to know. 

My main project that I have worked on this semester is creating a new organizational system for the games and toys. After observing regular operations for the first couple of weeks, I realized that a common issue they have at K1ds Count is missing toys and game pieces. I think this is because there are multiple game closets around the building but no specific order to what games go where. I noticed that the upstairs cabinets by the main stairwell fill up the fastest with games and then the other cabinets are left bare. There are also a lot of games that there are multiples of, and they all end up being in the same closet and not spread out to the other game cabinets. To solve this problem, I proposed that I find a way to label all the game boxes, so they have a designated game closet to be returned to. I decided the best method would be color dots on each box that matched the cabinet that they need to go in. I started by taking inventory of all the games in the building and recording them. I then split the games into 3 groups for each of the game cabinets and made sure to evenly distribute the duplicate games around the building. 

I picked this system because I felt that it was easy to follow and see when something is not in the right place. I have also known this system to work at other locations where I have worked, so I felt confident that it would work here too. 

     After the first week that all the boxes were labeled, I already saw a difference in the organization of the game cabinets. There were fewer duplicate games being stored in the same cabinet. I like that the colors are easy to see and the color coding on the shelves is a good reminder to check the box to see if that is where it belongs. It is also easy to see if a box is in the wrong place because of the different colored sticker. I am glad I was able to work on this project this semester and hopefully I have made a system that will continue to work for them in the future. I wondered why the previous organizational systems have failed and I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it has to do with lack of pictures or colors. When I started organizing the toy closet, I first tried word labels, and those are overlooked or tend to fall off the shelf all together. I have seen while working with the kids here are K1ds Count, it is easier and faster to recognize a matching or miss-matched color or picture than it is to read a work printed on a shelf or on a box. Pictures or colors tend to stick out better and are more obvious than a word label and the stickers are less likely to fall off or go missing. The previous systems have relied on printed labels which work in some cases. When things are cleaned and put away quickly, like at K1ds Count, it is faster to put boxes in an open spot rather than read the labels to find the designated location for that box. Hopefully the color coding will be a quicker system with less processing time for those quick transition times between clients.