OVERVIEW

Friends Day Centre operates from 08h15 to 14h00, Mondays to Fridays during Western Cape school terms. Our classroom activities include handicrafts, training to perform simple domestic tasks, self-help life skills and toilet training, and teaching alternative methods of communication. We also encourage outside play activities. We offer physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, music therapy and drama & movement therapy.

We re-assess our learners on a continual basis and endeavour to design classroom programmes around their specific needs. Our aim is to ensure quality care in order to give parents peace of mind, and we focus on enabling the child to function as best as possible in order to be integrated into society and their community with no stress or trauma.

The Centre has a fully equipped physiotherapy room and a special sensory room where the children are taken to discover all their senses. Friends Day Centre is the only Special Care Centre in the Western Cape which provides daily stimulation and on-going training for adults who are severely intellectually & physically disabled. It is important that, even as adults, our learners continue to receive education and training. Without this stimulation they sit at home doing nothing, losing the skills that they have acquired and the relationships they have built up, very often becoming depressed and angry, and sometimes developing difficult behaviours, all brought about by boredom.

The Centre currently provides a door-to-door transport service. We operate 3 buses, which cover a large area from Kraaifontein in the north, to Kirstenhof in the south. Each route takes approximately 2½ hours, mornings and afternoons. Our before-care, after-care and holiday-care programmes are run by staff members on a private basis, but have become a very vital need, especially for working parents.