Just have to share

Elle tickling herself "gicka, gicka"

Nothing to long or exciting to post about, just my continued awe at Elle's learning. Having worked with children with disabilities for so long and picking apart skills and writing goals, I am continually amazed to see Elle learning things that I work on with pre-schoolers and elementary aged kids. A couple of things that make me smile daily are:

1) Grandma brought flowers over to our house recently and taught Elle how to "smell/sniff" the flowers. Now Elle just has to see pictures of flowers and she wrinkles up her little nose and begins sniffing. Here at camp there are lots of flowers and lots of people paying attention to her. So, she frequently points out the flowers to people and "sniffs!!" It is beyond cute :-)

2) I roared awhile back to her book that had lions, tigers, bears...oh, my.... and leopards etc. Today in the store she was roaring for her "new friend" (the lady working at the store) and then proceeded to pick up the leopard slippers! Wow, talk about generalization of knowledge/skills!!!!

3) She has become to most social little girl. EVERYONE at camp loves to pay attention to her. She is the complete center of attention. What are we going to do once we are home and its just us and the cat??????!?! Anyone walking by her receives a sweet little "hiiii," and if you don't hear it she will continue with a "Ahhhhhhhhhghhgh" followed by a wave and the sweet little "hi" repeated. So yesterday we drove up to camp and Elle says "hiiiii" and begins waving at camp, no one in site yet.

Actually, when we arrived to camp she was shy of everyone and hid her face between my legs. As she began to feel comfortable, she stopped hiding and everyone was her friend. So, when someone new came to camp, I thought that she would be their friend too, but, she went back to hiding. It made me realize that she really has strong facial recognition skills. Her friends are really people she recognizes and not just anyone. Funny thing, she mainly hides from men, not usually women :-)

4) Learning is such an amazement to me. We are doing sign language with her and she has finally caught on. Just after we ate lunch today she was playing and then began whining. She left the toys and walked over to me while signing "night, night." I picked her up and put her in bed. Simple as that. Someone at camp said the verdict isn't out whether sign language will slow down speech acquisition, so they didn't do sign with their kids. My correlation is that sign language is like crawling. No one crawls as an adult, eventually everyone learns to walk unless they have a true disability. I would rather that Elle have a communication method before her oral motor skills are developed then just throwing herself on the floor and crying because she is exhausted or because I don't know what she wants.