Saturday, June 25, 2011

Little Triumph

Lydia had her first therapy appointment this week.  One of the things we're working on is getting her to draw a vertical line on paper.  She is also working on following small directions and not ignoring adults when they tell her to do something and she wants to just play.  These are just a few of the MANY goals she has, but my story is especially relevant to those.

A few months back Scholastic was having a sale on their website for $1 PDF books. This is a sale they have a few times a year, and I thought I'd look through and see what they had.  They had several workbooks for preschoolers that focus on pre-writing skills, and I bought a few.  I figured it would be better to print them out over and over than have to buy a bunch and go through them quickly.  Especially with our awesome laser printer and free paper I get at the back-to-school sales every year.  Because I had these on hand, I figured I'd look through them and see if there were any pages that focused on drawing lines in a controlled way.  I found a few pages in this book, and printed them out.

Well, this morning I sat down with Lydia and got a pencil and talked her through it.  She was whiny about it at first because she just wanted the pencil to scribble on the pages.  The first two pages we tried she just whined.  On the third page, however, we had a breakthrough.  The picture showed three dogs, with guidelines down to 3 bones.  The goal is to draw between the guidelines to help the dogs get to the bones.  I helped her do them, and then gave her the pencil to try to do it herself.  And she did!  She drew from the dogs down to the bones!  She had troubles staying in the lines, and that was fine because she's only two, but she tried!  I've never had a breakthrough like that with her before, and it was great!  It gave me hope that I will enjoy this homeschooling thing.  If I can find so much joy in my two year old drawing a few scribbles on a paper, I think will do fine.  I was also excited to see that I could get through to her and show her things without her entirely baulking at my attempts.


So that's my little story. Small, but it made me feel pretty good today.

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