A is for…
Awesome Baby!
Pepaw (my dad) gets the award for helping J-Man make one of his best achievements this week. He got him some flash cards at the dollar store. One of the packs was for ABCs, with one letter and a picture under it per card.
He put A-F out on the coffee table and said, “Can you point to the ‘A’?” And by God, J-Man went over and pointed to the A. Then showed off and did it for the B too after being asked. Oh, and to add a degree of difficulty to it, he did the B from the backside of the coffee table, which meant the B was upside-down from where he was looking.
Woo hoo!
His letter recognition has suddenly become a source of a potential foothold into speech with him. The speech therapist is starting to think some combination of a more robust picture system and letter-based communication (potentially with assistive technology of some sort if it really takes off) might be a short and medium-term solution to our communication issues.
The more technological resources are obviously for down the road, but we’re pondering ways to improvise a low-tech version (pictures and cards) for where he is now. Our hope is to come up with something that will work until his speech can have time to grow to a point where he can use it relatively comfortably and effectively, which may still be a much longer-term goal. We just don’t know.
In any case, those details are for tomorrow. Now we celebrate!
This post was brought to you by the letters A and B, and also K, which is still my favorite letter. - J-Man
3 comments
That’s awesome! Maybe he’ll be an early reader?
Wow. This is so wonderful!
@magicdrgn - He’s gone bonkers in the last couple of days identifying letters not just by pointing ‘on command’, but by actually pointing to the cards and saying them without prompting! (more in a bigger post soon) He did almost half the alphabet, though some of his letter pronunciations sound very similar to each other to a lot of people. In any case, he made us speechless!
His developmental therapist is suggesting looking into some sort of pre-reading program, though he’ll need something well off the beaten path from the regular versions of that. His speech therapist seems pretty amazed by this whole thing. We meet with her in the morning for the first time since his recent explosion of surprising achievements. I’ll be very interested to see what she says.
It’s interesting how you ask “where’s the cow?” (from his little farm) and he rarely will reach for it, even after working on this for months. You ask him “where’s the ‘A’?” on a flash card, and he will point with some regularity, or do it completely without prompting. And he’s picked up on that very quickly.
His DT was saying this is how it happens sometimes. Letters, numbers, etc. can be much more concrete to some kids. I don’t know. This is a real mystery to us, though a good one!
@JB - Yep! And it keeps getting better!
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