Words, and how to get them.

In August of last year, as I may have mentioned before, the Small Boy was using two "words". They were "no" and "oh no." That was not much of an achievement for a kid of nearly three (and was considerably down from the count we'd had some six - nine months earlier)


These days, he communicates verbally about all sorts of things. Not very easily - I can see his little brain going chug chug chug at very simple questions. He doesn't like questions much - they come on someone else's schedule. But an exchange like "How old are you?" (*think* *think* *think*) "Are you three?" (....) "Are you four?" "Yes! I four!" still makes me smile, considering that even a few weeks ago the answer to that would have been to hide his head in my armpit.


How did we get from there to here? One of the things that brought us was the "It takes two to talk" program from The Hanen Centre. I fell in love with this book the first time we used it - full of devastatingly simple, obvous-after-the-fact insights that just worked. We used this in conjunction with Speech Therapy, getting a photocopied chapter to take home with us after each session. That's probably somewhat illegal, considering I think we ended up with about a third of the book, so I won't mention the name of our Speechies, even though they're great too.


At the beginnng, it didn't even look like "speech" therapy. We just played with toys in the therapist's office on the floor. But with one important twist.


"You're showing him how to play with the toy", said the therapist." That's great. You're showing him really nicely. But Stop It! Stop showing him. Look and see what HE does."

It was a box of magnetic people, in halves. Clearly the aim was to mix and match the halves to put different leg halves together with the top halves. He was ignoring both bits. He was sticking the box on his head and using it as a hat.

"Ok. Now you do the same."

Small Boy with box on head. Mumma with box lid on head. Box falls off. Lid falls off. Small Boy laughs. And then...

"Did you see that?" He looked you straight in the eye. AND he looked ME straight in the eye too. He's looking for our reactions. He's engaged. Now do it again."

And we did it again. And again. (that's a bit of a theme with the Small Boy). After a while, we added some language ("Up!"). And we did it again. And again...

(To Be Continued...)