Sunday, September 11, 2016

First Tot School Post in a Long Time!

Joshua turned 3 in June. Because of him being non verbal and no resources available to him, I figured it would be forever before we ever started him with school.

In July he had 5 occasionally used words. But the end of August he blew up with over 200 words, used every day. It's like a light switch flipped and suddenly he won't shut up! He's still approximately a year "behind" in speech so will be continuing with speech therapy as it's available.

In this word explosion, we discovered that he's freaking smart. Like advanced smart. Like possibly gifted smart.

Some of his first clear "words" were identifying (correctly) the letters on the fridge. 


Then he started counting everything. Ok. This isn't simply a tot school start. I need to do an assessment to see what he knows. I got a simple preschool assessment from 1+1+1=1. I knew he probably couldn't do the line tracing and cutting, but I knew he could do some of the letters.

At 3 yrs, 2 mths he can:
- recite the alphabet and identify all 26 capital letters (we haven't tried low case yet) out of order
- count objects to 13 and identify all numbers 0-10 except 8 and 9
- identifies circle, square, heart and star
- identifies blue, yellow, green and red

We are shocked. He was classed as non-verbal 2 months ago. Because of this we never bothered doing any of the beginning learning with him that we did with the other kids (we did "Shoe!" with him instead of "One, two. Two red shoes" that we did with the older kids). Yet he just assessed at a higher level than a lot of Kindergarteners. Um. Crap.

I pulled out my tot school/preschool stuff from Olivia. I pulled out a few items to introduce it to him. He is in love. He sees the bin of laminated printables on the kitchen table and begs for school. He's not really interested in any writing/coloring activities but males are typically slower to pick up that fine motor stuff than females so I'm not worried. The girls think it's awesome that he has school now too.

Anything with cars makes Joshua happy

He loves the Magic School Bus books and videos

He did this farm animal matching game several times this week

More cars! And he gets to count them! Two of his favorite things!


Linking up with 1+1+1=1 and Homeschool Creations.

 

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