This past week Kailey’s preschool teacher finally was able to get her communication binder with weekly goals pulled together.  Thanks to my sweet sister-in-law watching Lucas, I actually was able to take the time to meet with her and discuss Kailey’s progress.  It was so wonderful to hear about how much everyone feels she has progressed just over the past few months and to get a glimpse into her day.  Some things I learned:

~Not only has the crying stopped at drop-off, but through the rest of the day as well.  Things that were clearly stressful to her a few months ago are being taken in stride now.  Kailey’s always been fairly friendly and outgoing, so I was glad to see the teachers seeing this side of things, rather than just a crying ball of unhappiness.  My meeting ran a few minutes past the time class is usually dismissed and when I made my way to the lobby, I saw my tiny girl sitting there with the classroom aide.  She was surrounded by other therapists and parents, like a little queen holding court.  She was charming them all and, of course, showing them her latest art project.

~Kailey’s starting to conquer the gross motor room.  I can’t even imagine how intimidating this room must have seemed to her.  She’s still working on mastering stairs (walking on her own), plus she’s very tiny.  The over-sized room with thick gym mats, trampoline, ball pit, etc. was probably overwhelming on it’s own, but add in two rowdy boys?  It was the perfect setup for some tears.  But this week?  My girl went in the ball pit.  No tears.  I bet there were even some giggles.  The therapist was telling me that she used to refuse getting on the trampoline at all.  Then they were able to convince her to give it a go only by keeping both boys cleared off it.  This week, however, she was all over that thing.  That’s my girl.

~Her teacher is on to her “I’m just a cute little thang and need your help” routine and is pushing her just like I had hoped.  She even sneaked in on the gross motor room and saw Kailey not only mostly putting her shoes and socks back on herself, but trying to be a little mother hen and help the boys.  Ha!

We also got a binder with some activities for us to work on at home, in order to help Kailey work on some of her goals.

  • Verbalize at least two words in order to receive whatever she is requesting. ~ This has actually gone really well over the past week.  We kept getting reports from her teachers that she was using word approximations for entire sentences, but she would refuse to do this with us at home.  (She’s sooooo “3″).  Ms. Kathleen said we needed to give it a try when we had time to wait her out and not just give her whatever she was requesting.  Well, low and behold, once she learned we were no longer giving her anything without a verbal request, she complies all the time.  We are modeling the sentence for her in it’s entirety and then modeling each word as she repeats them back (with approximations, some of which are amazingly clear words!).  Eventually, the goal is to help her start the sentence and then fade out the modeling for the last words as she says them on her own.  My mom reported that she asked for “one more cracker please” without any modeling one day this week.  I am skeptical, but Ms. Kathleen says she isn’t surprised at all, as Kailey is starting to put words together at school without prompting.  Good work, girlie!
  • With food and snacks, Kailey will leave her plate, bowl, spoon, etc. on the table. ~ She tends to shove things away when she is finished or not interested.  This also translates to school when she tries to toss her paper when she is done coloring.  They were taping her paper to the table for a while, but now I think she mostly listens to the instruction to “leave it.”  We went out and bought some placemats for the kids.  Ms. Kathleen said K is allowed to push the plate away from her and to the edge of her placemat, but the placemat should set the boundary for where she has to leave her things.  We’ve done pretty well with the goal this week.  She’s also had to sit and wait while Lucas finishes eating, rather than letting her down.  This is helping to shift the subtle power struggle in her mind, i.e. we decide when the meal is done and not her.
  • Interactive play with language to increase attention span. ~ We admittedly did rather poorly at this during the past week.  The goal is to sit with K twice a day for at least 10-15 minutes and play interactively with three different toys, for 3-4 minutes each.  Not a hard goal at all, but when you have two kids who are rather whiny from colds, the interactive play falls a bit on the wayside.  But we are going to do better next week and this weekend will also go and get a few new toys for this purpose.