Shine Child Guidance Centre

The Star newspaper had an article yesterday which I only read today (I read stale news!) about a new centre for special needs kids.

Shine
It's called Shine Child Guidance Centre, at Jaya One. They tout it as a "one stop multidisciplinary development and guidance centre" for kids with learning disorders from age of 2 to 18. It's set up by an altruistic individual who bought the unit, teaching materials and hired professionals to run it. It's a not-for-profit centre, with a team comprising a psychologist, a SLP, OT, and special ed teacher.

I'll call them or even drop by to check it out. But I think it's focus is slightly different from my son's needs. Their target group is those with learning disorders, inc those with autism, Asperger's, Downs, developmental delays and behavioural issues.

But having said that, I do remember another mother of a special needs boy saying that you wont necessarily know if your kid has learning disabilities until they start school. My son hasn't started school. But so far, he doesnt show signs of learning disabilities apart from the speech disorder dysarthria. My only concern is on his maths ability cos he doesnt seem to grasp the concept of the number line, or measurements, and not so good at patterns. But then again, he's still young and I've not really focused on maths.

Nilai International School
That individual is also setting up Nilai International School, an associate institution of Nilai University College, offering Cambridge International Curriculum and has inclusion programme for high functioning autistic kids. Wow! Finally we see a model of schools overseas that have inclusion programmes, being set up locally. Only problem is Nilai is so far from KL.

Contact details of Shine: Tel: 03-79608809. Their website isn't quite ready yet but you can check back later at http://shine.my/

For the article in The Star that mentions the Centre, go to:  http://parenthots.com/features/More-kids-with-learning-disabilities.aspx.

I couldnt find the other article just on Shine and the Nilai International School, which has far more details, in the online version of Star. So if you can, best to look up the physical newspaper dated Wed 2 Dec 09, Page T19 (Section Two of Star)