In the Meantime

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

"Sistah"

William learned a new word this week. You can hear the affection in his voice when he points to Lily or Abigail and exclaims, "Sistah!"

Also, in follow up to the post about the colors dvd, the tutor said today that William said all ten colors on the color chart correctly. It's been a little over two weeks since we started watching that video. What's more important, he's started naming colors of things throughout the day. Praise God!

Sunday, September 25, 2011

You will know them by their fruits

Last night we had a belated 40th anniversary celebration for my parents. Thanks to a couple amazing sisters-in-law, it was a beautiful evening. (Hopefully pictures will be coming soon.)

My parents are so easy to celebrate. Afterwards, Eric made the comment that they are a great example of humble faithful service- maybe not impressive at first glance, but now their labors are coming to fruition, and it's striking. It's such a pleasure to rise up and call them blessed because they are- and we are blessed because of them. I love you, Mom and Dad!

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Preschool Prep Colors DVD

With all the curriculum and treatment conversations that go on in the special needs world, it's hard for me to understand how I didn't know about the Preschool Prep dvds until recently. I guess I had seen them around, but didn't understand how they differed from other educational videos.

We have a good bit of experience with preschool educational videos in this house. Not that I think any particular video is a magic pill. But, hey,we're going to be watching movies anyway, so it doesn't hurt to make some of them educational. We've tried Baby Babble, Winnie the Pooh, Leap Frog, Hooked on Phonics, Sesame Street, Boz, and others. William has learned things from them, some more than others.

What makes preschool prep different, is it's aimed at a young audience (1-2 year olds), the audio is extremely simple (music and whatever words the child is suppose to be learning- nothing more), and they did a study documenting the extreme success of the alphabet video.

That alphabet video is a bit much for William. But he loves the colors one. Each color has a personality, theme music, and setting. They act out silly or fun little scenes while repeating their names over and over. It progresses from each color acting out their own scene, to each color taking turns finding things that match them, to them working together to color pictures. It ends with them all dancing.

We started watching the Colors dvd last week. At that time William could not name any of the colors consistently. Today both his tutor and speech therapist reported he knew red, blue, and green. When he gets all 8 colors, I'm going to move on to shapes, then numbers. Hopefully after that he'll be ready for the alphabet one (which has upper and lower case). There are also 3 sight word dvds we will hopefully be able to benefit from in the future. God has provided again!

Retest

Lisa, William's amazing speech therapist, came as usual today. When she walked in, she explained that she was going to retest William today. That was a surprise to me; she had just tested him in the spring. But she explained that he's made so much progress over the summer, she wanted to retest him to get a better sense of where his language skills were at. Praise God!

Creation Wall

We've spent the last month putting together this creation mural. The posters across the top are William's. The ones across the bottom are Lily's. Lily likes to point to them and sing Mrs. Leinhart's (my kindergarten teacher's) 7 Days of Creation song with me.

One night, I was sitting on the couch nursing, staring up at the half completed mural, when Eric looked over at me. He was confused for a minute. Then he said, "You love home schooling, don't you?" Yes, I do!