Friday, January 22, 2010

Running in Circles

There is no other word to explain it right now except frustration. Ryan's speech is coming along and he seems to be fairly intelligible the majority of the time. However, his listening skills and command of the language is a very different story. He has been tested recently and in many areas he is ahead of where he should be developmentally (by a year or two). Yet, we keep finding these gaps in his language. For example, he has a hard time using the pronouns he/she and his/her. His auditory memory skills seem to be behind as well. When reading a very simple two-three sentence "story" to him, he is not able to recall the information to answer a question. This leads to another area where he is experiencing a great deal of difficulty - questions. Just this morning while riding in the car, he was not being kind to his sister. So, once we got home I asked him "Are you ready to use kind words and come in and play or do you want to stay here until you are ready to be kind?" Well, what did he hear ... "stay here" That then led to a full on meltdown. Errr!!! A lot of times, it just doesn't connect and I have no clue what to do!! It seems like I am running in circles. We are doing so many things to foster his language and surround him with language. He has great role models, we read constantly to him, have a table with a book on tape at it, educational listening toys (TAG reading system - Leapster - etc), preschool environment, etc. In fact, he is so surrounded that he is beginning to try to read. I have not held him back from trying to do so , but have also done nothing to foster that as I know our main focus needs to be these other areas. I know those are two very different areas of language, but they are dependent upon one another. Thus, the frustration!! At this point, I need to do some online research and most importantly place it in the hands of God!!