Protfolio 2 : Paralympians

Paralympians

1. Who are they? Definition and categories:

• Definition: Athletes with a range of physical and intellectual disabilities including mobility, Amputations, Blindness and cerebral palsy.
• Categories: 1) wheelchair 2) Blindness 3) Amputee 4) Cerebral Palsy 5) Mental 6) others.

2.What challenges do they face? Personal / social?

• Limits
• Environmental
• Judgments

3. What have they achieved so far?

• Medals
• Respect
• New dreams
• Self confidence 

4. When did the Paralympics start?

•      The first official Paralympics was in Italy, Rome, 1960

Vocabulary:-

• Disability: lack of adequate power, strength, or physical or mental ability
• Amputee: a person who has lost all or part of an arm, hand, leg, etc., by amputation.
• Cerebral palsy: a form of paralysis believed to be caused by a prenatal brain defect or by brain injury during birth, most marked in certain motor areas and characterized by difficulty in control of the voluntary muscles.
• Intellectual disability: A person with an intellectual disability may have difficulty learning and managing daily living skills. This is because their cognitive (thought-related) processing is impaired. Children and young people have different abilities and develop at different rates. Some children find learning new skills or information difficult. This may be because they have an intellectual disability.
•  Dwarfism: a person of abnormally small stature owing to a pathological condition, especially one suffering from cretinism or some other disease that produces disproportion or deformation of features and limbs.
• Multiple sclerosis: a chronic degenerative, often episodic disease of the central nervous system marked by patchy destruction of the myelin that surrounds and insulates nerve fibers, usually appearing in young adulthood and manifested by one or more mild to severe neural and muscular impairments, as spastic weakness in one or more limbs, local sensory losses, bladder dysfunction, or visual disturbances.
•  Congenital disorder: a defect that is present at birth.