Wednesday, April 29, 2009

ABC




Wade started with a new speech therapist today. He is eager to begin speaking Big People language.

For a while he was stuck on the letter B; now he loves the K sound. He tries to work it into his conversations as many times as he can. With a bit of a guttural flair, he sounds as if he's speaking German.

Of course, at this point his English is still quite a bit better than his German or French.

He astonished me last night though. He was poking the letters out of his foam alphabet puzzle. I noticed when he came to the letter U that he signed umbrella before he poked it out. Intrigued, I wondered how many of the other letters he could recognize without any visual or verbal prompts from me. As I held up the letters he either said the sound or signed a word that started with the letter for 13 out of the 26 letters of the alphabet. I was so excited I could hardly cook supper.

I give great credit to http://www.starfall.com/. We have been using that for a long time with him and the last few months I've been doing 30 minutes of it per day with him. It's a great online learning to read program with a kindergarten curriculum coming out this fall.