Early intervention supports academics

  

Digestive system in clay

   Can’t stress more on early intervention! Working with Prisha in the first 5 years was very enriching as well as exhausting, yet I see the benefits of it over the years. Talking to her in rich language while showing her things around me, bringing in details, stressing on important parts of speech etc and also always pushing her to think and make a decision, helped us a lot in her skills she has developed today. One such example is in the picture below.

    For biology, she needed to make a 3D model of the digestive system in clay. Now I have always encouraged my kids to use the resources around instead of rushing to shop which is an easy option but it saves money, time and is easy on the environment. She looked into the deep well of her resources in the cupboard and found some left over clay from her previous school( 2.5 years old now, yet good once soaked 😉) and a bag of red wax clay( again 2.5 years old left unused). She rattled off on the phone about it while I did my groceries. I don’t give suggestions anymore as I believe in self empowerment and self help. Due to intense hands on work all these years, she found solutions to problems like...lack of enough raw material, alternatives, finding ways to work with old resources as they were dry, finding the right material that’s plastic coated to avoid sticking, etc. The red wax was new material she worked with and instructions were in Bahasa. So she found ways to work on it. By the time I returned and did the rest of my work through the day...she worked behind closed doors(to avoid me walking into a messy room and blowing my top off) and by night she presented the model to me! Look at the details... the way the organs are piled up like they do in our bodies and then color difference that served two purposes...avoid buying another pack of clay and then shows the difference between organs and the intestines. Bonus... looks beautiful and above all...she learnt about the digestive system in a very creative way! True work of art! 

     Now tell me why art isn’t important....why creativity is for selected few and only academics are important.  We are born creative and art should come naturally. It brings extra zest to learn the subject besides relaxing the mind from the learning pressures. Encourage kids to self learn, take away the pressures of learning by helping them develop their creative sides and help them become problem solvers through this journey. They also feel more pride as it’s their work of art. They also feel good that their parents trust them with their skills and get more confident about themselves. They learn to take failures better and through small victories learn to be self motivated as they grow. Never ever too late....resist spoon feeding, instead let them experiment, fail and find their path to success!! I shall be uploading the project once completed. Hope this post helps someone to see how early intervention supports kids life long.

Small difference in accent

Prisha has just made out a small difference in a word. How we think it's not possible with the hearing impaired. I felt thrilled and she found it so amusing and couldn't stop laughing ! She is my little wonder.Water is that word that makes her giggle. Small discoveries.

Prisha's write up

Prisha was so inspired that she has written a whole post on it. I am loving it. Click on....I am proud

Prisha's write up

Prisha was so inspired that she has written a whole post on it. I am loving it.

Hellen Keller

A good speech therapy tip

     We have been going for speech therapy to Ms.Esser for the last couple of months.She has been giving us loads of work where there is fill in the blanks,completing the sentences,verbs, nouns,picture descriptions and also the tenses.Prisha has been mixing up with tenses many times while writing things.So clear up that issues,Ms.E gave her some picture descriptions.In the 6 pictures, she had to 3 in present tense and the other 3 in past tense and she had to alternate each tense.This way she was able to differentiate between the tenses much better.I really found this tip very useful and wanted to share it on the blog. 

Year ending IEP update at school

Prisha's birthday card for her Class teacher

      This morning we had a meeting at school with the IEP teacher who gives 50 minutes per day in class and also the head of the department. There were some great points and some points where we need to work with her.The 50 minutes were earlier alone in a room but now Mrs.K comes to the classroom and sits with her and explains her things where she needs help.She finds that Prisha is benefiting more this way.
       Some great feedback from them was about her personal attributes.She is very motivated, humorous,enthusiastic , great concentration, has good memory,eager to learn and takes correction very well.She is very spirited and takes correction very positively. It made us very happy to hear this.They were also happy that we worked with her and there was immense growth in her learning.

Her progress with IEP -
1.Able to sequence and retell story using pictures and gives an appropriate end too.
2.Uses singular and plural and understands the difference.
3.Has achieved goals in articulation of speech sounds.Words ending in blends still need to be worked on.

Needs improvement here -
1.Needs support with existing language goals relating to syntax and semantics with additional complexity of language.
2.Needs additional experiences to develop a wider "world knowledge".
3.Should benefit from activities and experiences that give her more points of reference with her peers.Needs to know what they celebrate,play watch on TV or talk about.That would help her interact socially.
      So we have loads of plan this summer.We are in India for just 3 weeks so that we are back here for 7 weeks and can attend the 2 times a week speech therapy classes.I don't want her to slide back in the vacations.We need to work harder on ourselves.Need to get some grammar books from India of grade 1 and 2 and let her practice it at home.Read loads to her and help her use new vocabulary. I am just keeping my fingers crossed and really hope and pray that when we start school in August, she has achieved more in her learning and understanding.The abstract has to be worked on and make her learning and understanding from 2 dimension to multi dimension.