Today I reassessed Becca's recognition of the uppercase alphabet letters. She consistently named all except J, D, N, K, and G; therefore naming 21 letters. When she arrived in early January, the form in her folder shows she named only 5 letter C, G, L, R, and W. We will be working to get all 26 uppercase letters consistently. We then made our letter k - kangaroo picture pocket. We tried an activity focusing on the concept of negative terminology. I gave her three shapes, two of the same color and one of another. I asked her to give me the one that is NOT the matching color. She couldn't do the task but did really attend to the training of IS vs IS NOT. We will continue to work on this concept of negative. We worked on a h-a-t picture card today. I handed her the materials and she was able to complete without instruction. She began gluing on the letters. She knew the t was sideways and corrected it. She glued them in the order: aht. When I asked her if hat started with the a sound, she said "no" and we then moved the letters. She was able to repeat the three sounds together, two times in a row with only minimal cueing! It was great to see her increased familiarity with the task. We reviewed her "See the animals" reader from the other day. Today she provided more three word responses with "look at ----" and said the animal name.
Today we read a low level reader (simpler language) about "Horses". We will be reviewing the terms mane, mare, and foal throughout the week to see of she can name these items by description (building vocabulary from informational text). We made a paper bag puppet of a horse to go along with this activity. As she played with the puppet, she did hand it me and said "Miss Debbi's turn". I wish now that I had listened closer to hear if she actually got the possessive onto my name. I was excited to see her initiating turn taking.We did our fine motor paper tasks throughout the morning. We completed a worksheet in which she had to tell me if the picture started with the "d" sound. She needed me to repeat the initial sounds of the words that did not start with d. We then traced upper and lowercase letter d with each picture that started with d. In tracing I am trying to focus on using the pencil in the target area, near the dotted lines, and eyes on the paper. I'm not as concerned with her performance in the actual tracing. She typically just starts doodling anywhere on the paper. I am now more so concentrating on her finding the dotted lines and realizing that is the target of the activity. This is similar to our coloring tasks. She is doing better at independently coloring and more so in a target area. We are working now on using different colors for the target areas. For example, today with our paper bag horse puppet we colored the tongue red, the mane black, and the rest of the horse brown. Modeling and hand-over-hand assistance are provided. I'm finding with the tracing with the pencil, she is really letting the work fall to my hand with the hand-over-hand assistance, so I will be working to reduce how much physical assistance is provided and move to more verbal. This will take some time. Additionally, we are working on her posturing. She likes to stand and lean into me. After a short time, she has gotten to a point where she is leaning all of her weight on to me. I've been using cues of gently pulling back and telling her she's going to fall. Those cues usually work quickly to get her to right herself and stand up. (We've been working on this for a while.). I've noticed she is also greeting people in a similar way in the hallway. She often walks up to them, right into their legs. Many are sweet to bend down and hug her, but she is dropping her weight into their arms. We are really starting to focus on standing back and using "our words" to greet and leave others. Because she knows "hi" and "bye", my cues to her are more open ended, such a "what do we say when we see a friend" and "what do we say when some one is leaving". This way I'm not providing her the words, but the prompt of when to use the words she knows. We will continue to work on appropriate greetings and departures. She has improved in walking down the hall. She is needs less reminders to go straight down the hall and not disturb other doors. In a pre-math activity, we used Duplo building blocks to match colored pictures of patterns to stack the Duplos (three to five). Becca typically picked 75% of the correct colors, but needed help to get them in the right order. We then counted the blocks, in which she said some of the numbers.
Potty status: 9:50 she said she needed to potty, but did not produce. I took her at 10:20, 10:55, 11:25, and 11:55. On all occasions she argued with me about going, did not want to sit on the potty, and did not produce. She kept jumping back off the seat and I would slowly count to 10 to try to get her to sit. On the last occasion, I took her in and she wouldn't go for me. I left her with Nana to try for her. She was dry the whole day at school.