Preschool meeting

I had a meeting with the preschool today about Bright Eyes' progress.

In a nutshell, after the first two terms, everyone is very very happy.

Socially: He's enjoying people and relating to all the children and knows everyone's name. He's learning not to stand to close to people, and is asking other children for help if he needs it. Lots of the bigger girls take good care of him and play with him. (One little girl went home to tell her mother that she was so pleased that Campbell was doing well at something...)

Independence: He needs much less adult help in doing things like getting his lunch or his jacket. And in the last two days, he took himself to the toilet three times! Wow - toilet training might be possible!

Skills: He's definitely improving in his fine motor areas. At the beginning of preschool, he almost never used his hands at all except to hold objects (trains mostly) or match similar sized things up with each other. Now he's regularly painting and drawing (with encouragement), squishing playdough, and even beginnig to use scissors. Gross motor is good too. He follows along and does all the actions in the exercise times, whereas at the beginning he would do the first couple and then space out.

Group time: he loves stories and sits happily for the whole of group time. When he began, he needed to have a train or similar toy with him to keep him happy, but that's not necessary now.

Language: this is where he falls down. We agreed that he has delayed receptive language - in other words, he doesn't understand a lot of what we say to him. Correspondingly, his expressive language is stilted and still quite scripted. He mixes up his pronouns constantly, gives odd answers to questions and comes out with extraordinary things at strange times.

Our teacher knows that RDI does not focus on language skills per se. RDI follows the idea that if we do the work of reteaching the brain to relate correctly, the language should follow along. In any case, language is something that should be worked on secondary to the relationship skills.

She did ask, however, if we would consider going to a speech therapist at any point. I assured her that yes, probably we would end up at speech some time, but I'm not that worried about it just yet. Anyway, Bright Eyes name is down on the list for the public speechie at the local hospital, so it's a matter of waiting...

I asked them to be aware of their declarative language versus asking questions all the time, and to sometimes try to do without language altogether when relating to him. When I went to pick him up from the other room, I cleared my throat and Bright Eyes looked up immediately to see what was going on. The teacher saw me do it and understood what I was talking about.

Something that I have to start doing is to think about where he is going to go to school after next year (starting in January 2009 - the Australian school year is the calendar year for overseas readers.) That's a scary thought!

Sometimes I just don't understand where things come from

Road signs are a particular favourite of Bright Eyes. He has an odd little script that goes with them too. If for example, we saw this sign on the road, he would say, "Forty sign red circle shape zero dancerr" in one quick breath, and with a very pronounced r sound on the end. It would take far too long to explain where the zero dancerr bit came from...

Mum and Dad were here today. Bright Eyes turns four in about three weeks, and Mum was talking to him about it. What follows is an approximation of the conversation.

"How old will you be on your birthday?"

"Bright Eyes is birthday cake."

"Yes, you'll have a birthday cake. Yummy. But how many candles will you have on the cake?"

"Birthday cake has candles."

"You'll have four candles on your cake. You'll be four."

"Bright Eyes three."

"Yes, soon you'll be four. You'll have your birthday and you'll be four."

"Soon four. Bright Eyes birthday."

"It will be Sister's birthday too. How old will she be?"

"Not sister birthday. Bright Eyes birthday."

"First yours, then sister's birthday. How many candles will she have on her cake?"

"Traffic lights."

Interested in me

In the last few days, Bright Eyes has been noticing what we've been doing, and asking us about it.

For example, today I was reading a book. He looked at me and said, "Is your book good Mum?"

"Yes" said I, surprised and pleased.

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I often call Bright Eyes a 'little duffer' when he's being silly or cute. We have a good laugh about it together.

Tonight he said, "I'm a little duffer." Then he looked at me and said, "You're a little duffer too Mum."

"No," I said, "I'm a big duffer."

He grinned, then looked at his little brother and said, "He's a baby duffer!"

Not wanted

I picked up Bright Eyes from preschool today, just when the group was heading outside for some active play.

He saw me and smiled, but then said, "go away Mummy, go away!"

Some might be hurt. I was delighted.

Crisis mode

Something that's really important when we do RDI is to get out of 'crisis mode'. Slowing down helps this. And getting through grief stuff also helps.

Being in perpetual crisis is exhausting and unworkable. You can't think creatively, and you have no energy to do anything more than react. RDI is about going beyond the reacting phase, and acting intentionally with your child.

I think we're getting there. And I really liked this quote from Dr Gutstein, the brains behind the program:

"You know you have turned the corner when, instead of spending all of your time worrying about what your child will do next and how you will deal with it, your child is spending all of his or her time wondering what you will do next, and how he or she will deal with it."

Objectives

One of our current objectives goes something like this: he should be able to make a comment on something he sees or hears or experiences, for the purpose of finding out our perspective on it, and then incorporate our perhaps different perspective with his own.

Yesterday we got out of the car into a very windy and cold atmosphere. Bright Eyes: "I can hear the beach." Looked at me.
Me: "Oh, no, that's not the beach. That's the wind making the noise."
Bright Eyes: "Wind making the noise."

I think he can do it!

Cooking

Bright Eyes and his sister made brownies this afternoon. It was her idea, but Bright Eyes stuck with her the whole 20 minutes or so that it took to find the ingredients, put them in, and mix it up. I could see he was desperate to taste the mix, but unfortunately we didn't make them gluten-free!

Afterwards, he hung around the kitchen, and I got him to help me make his 'heart chocolates' with his medication in them. He broke up two bars of chocolate, put it in the bowl, put it in the microwave with help, and then mixed in the icky stuff with me. He even tried to spoon it into the heart moulds. Beautiful!